Place Pins

For some time now I’ve been using Pinterest to create a catalog of photography-related web resources. As of this writing, the main board has more than 700 pins, most of which are links to other people’s lessons. But a handful of the pins are to entries in this blog, most of which are my own work.

Pinterest recently introduced Place Pins, a new system that allows markers to show up on a map indicating a connection between a pin and a place. As many of my blog entries feature photos tied to particular locations, I thought it might be fun to create a Place Pin board for The Photographer’s Sketchbook.

Thus far the experience has been somewhat mixed. Place Pins are somewhat hard to create. I’m not sure if it’s possible to create a pin for a place that isn’t already part of the Foursquare location database (which is to say that if it’s possible at all it’s not immediately obvious how to do it). Further, clicking on a pin and seeing where it is on the map works great, but clicking on a map point and seeing all the pins associated with it, not so much. For now all it shows is the most recent. So if you click on the Sedalia map point, it’ll show you the last pin of photos from the Missouri State Fair but not the other four.

That seems like the exact opposite of what I’d want. If I’m interested in a pin from the Field Museum, showing me where Chicago is on a map isn’t all that helpful. I’d much rather click on the Chicago map point and have it show me all my Chicago pins. Or better yet, have it work both ways.

As with many new web gizmos (especially on Pinterest), I’m intrigued by the idea but I think it needs a little more work.