Pinry: A Selfhosted Alternative to Pinterest | Hacker News Reader

Pinry: A Selfhosted Alternative to Pinterest

github.com

154 pointsthunderbong37 comments

Not that anyone was asking, but it turns out that unlike "tweeting" [0], "pinning" [1] is not a trademarked activity so people should feel free to "pin" to their heart's content on their self-hosted solutions.

[0] https://www.mandourlaw.com/twitter-wins-rights-tweet-tradema...

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2015/10/26/pinterest-loses-pin-tradem...

Just as long as the official definition of pinning includes "completely taking over search engine results and driving visitors toward UX that will make them wonder which version of the web _this_ is supposed to be," let's all pin away...

(Historical reference, not intended as sarcasm)

Another hilarious Pinterest trademark case: https://web.archive.org/web/20210413170119/https://niftylett...

After long search, I can add 2 additional alternatives:

- https://raindrop.io - online, free& paid. Good if no much metadata is needed. Raw data is not really accesseble

- https://en.eagle.cool/ - I LOVE it. Paid and local only. But Cross-Plattform and Dropbox sync available. Astonishing metadata management for all types of media. Automatically saves source url when browser-plugin is used.

> https://en.eagle.cool/ - I LOVE it. Paid and local only. But Cross-Plattform and Dropbox sync available.

Proprietary operating systems only, so not really an alternative no.

Pinterest is in the middle of my Venn diagram between "signup wall i see most often after googling something random", "To this day I have no clue idea how it works" and "I don't know a single person who uses this"

If you get married, you'll find yourself solidly in that intersection, don't you worry.

*engaged ;)

I find it completely maddening, and it poisons search results.

But on the other hand, in specific markets (like fashion, artistic photography etc.), Pinterest is unavoidable. People use it for planning all sorts of creative endeavours.

I loathe it, but I might consider using this for my mood boards.

I like it, isnt tech savy at all works well, I search walpapers for my smartphones,ideas for posters and desing for websites, isn't for thech savy people, and the results feels more curated than Google images

Pinterest is one of the most recommended tools when it comes to building collections for most things art related. I’ve taken a few courses on concept art/concept development and Pinterest has been in 90% of it.

It’s used to collect references and build mood boards.

So, while self hosted Pinterest is a nice idea, it does miss the powerful part of Pinterest which is its search and community. When I want to find roman armour or steampunk vibe architecture, I don’t even have to leave Pinterest most of the time because the collections I need to find are right there.

I totally agree; search and community works on the discovery engine; it’s probably the most under rated feature but the one i use most nowadays and most certainly the feature that onboards most and create repeated-use. I only sometimes pin stuff on boards from the “outside” for very specific things, more like visual bookmarking.

Honestly, Pinterest could be a great thing. It's only the scummy SEO, sign-up wall, and hiding the origin of images that people dislike.

My SO uses it to find ideas for home decoration. She can quickly find lots of related photos and pin them so she can come back and see if she still likes them, or show them to me.

Not something I use though.

All these years later ... all anyone ever wanted was /cgi-bin/gallery.pl ...

I know a lot of designers that use Pinterest to create moodboards for client projects.

Search for images fitting a specific mood/look they are going after and ordering them into collections (or however Pinterest calls it) is their most important feature.

This easy discovery is something they wouldn't get out of "/cgi-bin/gallery.pl".

What irks me personally about Pinterest is their SEO spam. Offloading externalities (image spam) onto all of us for their growth tactic. Classic 'tragedy of the commons'.

This misses a key value of Pinterest -- the collaborative filtering of "people who pinned this also pinned ...". To me, that's a huge value of Pinterest which you won't get on a self hosted instance.

this.

The added value of social networks solutions of ideas is: the social network features ;)

I need this more in my life.

It isn’t a faithful Pinterest alternative unless half the pins are advertisements.

I use it in a docker instance but it's a bit persnickety so I need to restart it every so often. But yeah I use it for mood boards for my novel.

The annoying thing is it assumes you want to save links, you can't just upload media to it directly, you have to instead feed it a url and configure its thumbnails to be really large.

I don't really know if there's an easy way to build a tagged image gallery of images I found surfing the web but pinry is a great start.

For a tagged image gallery, look into Shimmie 2.

Wow, this looks quite nice, thanks!

Mood boards — sounds interesting. How does that work, if you don't mind?

I think I sort of do the same thing but never heard it called anything.

Googling it now, but still wondering how you use it.

Designers use it to visualize the look (or mood) the would be going for in a design. They collect examples of images that all go into the same rough direction they could be going for in a design and collect those into one moodboard.

Then they would contrast that with a different direction on a second moodboard. And oftentimes more than two directions.

These help them to narrow down potential avenues to explore further. Either for themselves or especially with a client. Clients often profit from the visual aspect enabling them to point out what they like (and especially what they do not like). The designer can then ask questions regarding what especially they like, if it is the color, the combination of colors, the way the font is set and so on.

From there the designer starts their own exploration of what they learned from the client (or from asking themselves the same questions). It's a tool for exploring a space of vast possibilities and narrowing them down onto a manageable level.

[Edit] * Disclaimer * I am not a Designer. But I've worked with quite a few and found moodboards to be a helpful tool. But they can have their drawbacks when clients fall in love with one or two specific examples in a moodboard and are disappointed because the designer's own exploration will necessarily differ from those.

With my novel, I am wanting to capture the mood of in-novel entity details such as for example a particular setting.

A given location/setting starts in my head as something as simple as:

the protagonist's home village

the quirky support characters castle

the villain's lair

Readers love specificity, so while you are able to understand the aim of a setting in only the above few words, there is no atmosphere to help someone imagine the details of a particular setting.

But with a mood board, I can save several images that have aspects of an entity (such as a setting, character design, creature design, item, or article of clothing) in my novel worth talking about. These images are either mentally marked up or actually marked up using a graphics tablet to show which aspect I want from that image. That "completes" a particular mood board.

Later, when I'm writing the manuscript copy, I can look at the mood board and use it as a mental checklist to make certain that I have used all of the various creative aspects that I intended to for a given entity.

If it turns out that my descriptions have been rounded out completely in this particular unit of copy and I need to get on to the scene or sequel content, then the unused mood board details will sit there as inspiration in the future.

Very cool. I think I want some sort of "slide show" app running on a dedicated PC (maybe Raspberry Pi) + display. A folder of images and a few slide-show config parameters on how to display the images would be all that is needed.

You could archive the image folder + settings for, as you say, future use.

I would like to think something like the already exists (but easy enough tot create if not).

Not widely enough known: you can omit a site from Google search results with a "-site:" specifier.

There are too many I'd need to omit. I would love a whitelist-only search engine, or at least one where my whitelist is shown first and then I can select "show all results" if that's not what I need.

I know that directly flies in the face of what made the web great in the first place, but at this point, the open web has been so thoroughly polluted by marketers that I'm willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

You can make a whitelist-only search engine with Google's programmable search engine. It's quite useful; I've made a social media only search, one for programming (stackoverflow, GitHub, GitLab), one for education. The possibilities are endless.

[1] https://programmablesearchengine.google.com/about/

This may be nice, but would be better if it were a little more privacy and self hosted focused, like perhaps whoogle or searx

That doesn't work well for pinterest, since there are a million domain variations that need to be excluded, from pinterest.com to pinterest.ca and pinterest.co.uk.

It works far better to use -inurl:pinterest

^^^ great hint! needs to be known more

TIL

why? i never understood the "point" of pinterest and we now have alternatives but the question remains, why? isn't world moving towards instant and ephimerial content anyways ?

I make a lot of moodboards for my clients in pinterest.

I also have a huge 'inspiration' board in Pinterest. It's very specific for my workflow, but it serves it purpose very well.

curiously: who's aunt would ever host and maintain such a tech stack?

Or is it meant for teccies only?

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