How to schedule Pinterest posts (both ways, step by step)

Troy Underwood
Troy Underwood

Pinterest is the slowest-burning platform you can post to — and that's a compliment. A Pin doesn't die in a feed after six hours the way an Instagram post does; it keeps surfacing in search and home feeds for months. The catch is that Pinterest rewards steady pinning, and nobody actually wants to open Pinterest every day at 8pm to publish by hand.

Scheduling fixes that. There are two ways to do it: Pinterest's built-in scheduler, and a dedicated scheduling tool. This guide walks through both, including the limits Pinterest doesn't put in the headline.

Option 1: Pinterest's built-in scheduler

Pinterest lets business accounts schedule Pins natively, on desktop and mobile. Here's how:

  1. Log in to your Pinterest business account. Native scheduling isn't available on personal accounts — you'll need to convert (free) if you haven't.
  2. Create a Pin the way you normally would: upload your image or video, add a title, description, destination link, and pick a board.
  3. Choose "Publish at a later date" instead of publishing immediately, then pick the day and time.
  4. Confirm. Your Pin sits in a scheduled state until it goes live.

That's genuinely all there is to it, and for occasional pinning it's fine. But the limits bite quickly:

  • 10 scheduled Pins maximum. Once ten Pins are waiting, you can't schedule an eleventh until one publishes. If you Pin daily, that's a week and a half of runway.
  • 30 days ahead, max. No planning a seasonal campaign a quarter out.
  • One Pin at a time. There's no bulk scheduling — every Pin is created and scheduled individually.
  • No editing the media. After scheduling you can change the date, title, board, description, and link, but not the image or video itself.
  • Pinterest only. If the same content is going to Instagram or Facebook too, you're rebuilding it in each app.

If you pin a few times a month, stop here — the native scheduler is all you need. If Pinterest is an actual channel for you, the ceiling shows up in the first week.

Option 2: schedule Pinterest posts with a scheduling tool

A dedicated scheduler removes the queue cap and the 30-day window, and lets you batch. One important thing to check first: only use a tool that publishes through Pinterest's official API. Pinterest can flag accounts using unapproved automation as spam. (Schedulin publishes exclusively through the official Pinterest API, as does any legitimate scheduler.)

Here's the flow in Schedulin's Pinterest scheduler:

  1. Connect your Pinterest account. Sign in with Pinterest's official login once; your boards and board sections sync automatically.
  2. Create your Pin. Upload an image, a video, or multiple images for a carousel Pin. Add your title (up to 100 characters), a keyword-rich description, alt text, and the destination link you want traffic sent to.
  3. Pick the board and section. Your boards load right in the composer — no copy-pasting anything.
  4. Schedule it. Pick an exact date and time on the calendar, or drop the Pin into your queue and let it fill your next open slot. There's no cap on how many Pins you queue or how far ahead you plan.
  5. Repeat while you're in the zone. This is the real win: batch a month of Pins in one sitting, then don't think about Pinterest until next month.

Because everything lives on one calendar, the same session can cover your other channels — compose once and publish to Pinterest and Instagram together, with Pinterest keeping its title, board, and link while Instagram gets its own caption.

When is the best time to schedule Pins?

Honest answer: it matters less on Pinterest than anywhere else. Pins are surfaced by search and interest graphs for months, so cadence beats clock time. A steady five Pins a week outperforms fifty Pins on the first of the month.

That said, if you want to optimize, schedule into evenings and weekends in your audience's time zone — browsing-heavy hours — and let a smart queue learn from your own engagement rather than a generic chart.

Five habits that make scheduled Pins perform

  1. Write for search. Pinterest is a visual search engine. Put real keywords in your title and description — the phrases people would type — not hashtag soup.
  2. Always add the destination link. Pinterest is one of the few platforms that reliably sends clicks out. Tag links with UTMs (here's a free UTM generator) so the traffic shows up properly in your analytics.
  3. Use alt text. It's an accessibility win and another field Pinterest search reads.
  4. Keep images at 1000×1500. The 2:3 ratio is what Pinterest recommends; wider images get cropped in feeds. Current specs for every format are in our social image size guide.
  5. Favor fresh Pins over re-Pins. Pinterest's algorithm strongly prefers new images, even for the same destination URL. Re-Pinning the identical image to five boards in a burst is exactly the spam pattern that hurts accounts — a scheduler spacing out fresh designs is the safe version.

The short version

  • Light pinning? Pinterest's built-in scheduler: business account, 10 Pins queued, 30 days out, one at a time.
  • Pinterest as a real channel? Use an API-approved scheduler, batch monthly, keep a steady cadence, and put keywords and links in every Pin.

If you want to try the second route: Schedulin's Pinterest scheduler does image, video, and carousel Pins with boards, sections, and unlimited scheduled posts — free for 7 days, from $5/month after.