Idea Pins vs Standard Pins: What’s the Difference in 2026?

If you’ve gone looking for the “Create Idea Pin” button recently, you’ll have noticed it isn’t there. Pinterest stopped offering Idea Pins as a separate format in 2023. Even so, the old ones still turn up on boards everywhere, the name still appears in Ads Manager, and a surprising number of guides still tell you to make one.

So it’s worth clearing up what actually separated the two, and whether any of it affects the Pins you publish today.

A standard Pin is a single image or video with a title, description and a clickable link to a website. An Idea Pin was a multi-page, story-style Pin mixing photos, video clips, text and music, and for most of its life it had no outbound link. Pinterest merged the two into one Pin format in 2023. The “Idea” name now only exists as a paid ad format, Idea ads.

What is a standard Pin?

A standard Pin is the post Pinterest was built on. One image or one video, a title, a short description, and a link to wherever the idea came from.

People find it in their home feed or in search, tap in for a closer look, and click through to the recipe, product or article behind it. That click is the whole point. It’s why bloggers, Etsy sellers and affiliate marketers have always relied on this format more than any other.

Standard Pins also age well. Pinterest behaves more like a visual search engine than a social feed, so a Pin with a clear title and the right keywords can keep turning up in results long after the day you post it. The words you attach to it matter as much as the image, which is why it pays to learn how to write Pinterest descriptions that people actually search for.

You’ll also come across Rich Pins. These are standard Pins that pull extra details, such as a recipe’s ingredients or a product’s price, straight from the linked page.

What was an Idea Pin?

An Idea Pin was a multi-page Pin that played out a bit like an Instagram Story. Pinterest introduced it as the Story Pin in 2020 and renamed it the following year. A single Idea Pin could hold up to 20 pages, and each page could be a photo, a short clip, text, a voiceover, music or a sticker.

It suited anything that needed more than one frame to explain. Think of a recipe from chopping board to plate, a bedroom makeover shown in stages, or a braid broken down one step at a time.

The drawback was traffic. Idea Pins kept people on Pinterest, and for most of their life you couldn’t add a clickable link to your own site. Creators could win saves, comments and new followers, but turning that attention into website visits was another matter. Plenty of people who depended on Pinterest for clicks simply stuck with standard Pins.

Idea Pins vs standard Pins: side-by-side comparison

	Standard Pin	Idea Pin
Format	One image or one video	Multi-page story, up to 20 pages
Outbound link	Yes	No, for most of its life
Creative tools	Title, description, link	Music, stickers, text overlays, voiceover
Main purpose	Sending people to a website	Keeping people engaged on Pinterest
How success was measured	Outbound clicks	Saves, follows and comments
Best suited to	Blog posts, products, recipes, affiliate links	Tutorials, step-by-step guides, behind the scenes
Status in 2026	Part of the unified Pin format	Retired for organic posts; continues as Idea ads

How did Idea Pins and standard Pins differ in practice?

The table covers the basics. In day-to-day use, though, five differences shaped which format people picked.

Links came first. A standard Pin always had one, and an Idea Pin usually didn’t. For anyone treating Pinterest as a traffic source, that settled it before anything else was considered.

Depth was the Idea Pin’s strength. One image can only show one moment. If you were teaching something with eight steps, a multi-page Idea Pin explained it far more clearly than a single graphic with a long caption.

The creative tools weren’t shared. Music, stickers, voiceover and text overlays were exclusive to Idea Pins. Standard Pins stayed plain on purpose, with a strong visual and a clear title doing the heavy lifting.

Success looked different. A standard Pin did its job when people left Pinterest for your site. An Idea Pin did its job when they stayed, saved it and followed you. You can see this split clearly in your own numbers, and our guide to reading every Pinterest analytics metric explains what each one tells you.

Staying power favoured standard Pins. Idea Pins got a big push while Pinterest was promoting them, then lost that support once the company changed course. Standard Pins never depended on a push in the first place.

What happened to Idea Pins?

In May 2023, Pinterest announced it was combining standard Pins and Idea Pins into a single format. The rollout was gradual, so different accounts saw the change at different times, which explains why advice from that period often contradicts itself.

Now there’s one “Create Pin” option. It accepts images, video or a mix of both, and it borrowed the best parts of each old format. Every Pin can carry a link, as standard Pins always could. Every Pin also gets the music, stickers and text tools that used to belong to Idea Pins.

One behaviour has changed. If you upload several images to a single Pin today, Pinterest usually turns them into a video-style slideshow rather than separate swipeable pages. We walk through the process in how to add multiple photos to a Pinterest Pin.

Old Idea Pins weren’t deleted. They’re still viewable, and many now display as video Pins. The name itself moved to advertising, where Idea ads let brands run multi-page, tutorial-style campaigns, often in partnership with creators.

Which type of Pin should you use now?

Organic Idea Pins no longer exist, so the practical question is which style of Pin fits what you’re trying to do.

For website traffic, a single vertical image is still the most dependable choice. Aim for a 2:3 ratio, usually 1000 × 1500 pixels, give it a title built around what people search for, and link to a page that delivers exactly what the Pin promises. Pinterest pays attention to where your links lead, so a mismatched or slow landing page works against you. Our guides on adding keywords to Pinterest and using Pinterest to drive traffic cover this in more detail. If you sell handmade goods, pinning from Etsy is one of the more reliable ways to put this into practice.

For teaching or showing a process, go with a vertical video Pin or a multi-image Pin. You get the storytelling that made Idea Pins useful, plus the link they never really had. Before you film, check the current Pinterest video size and format requirements so nothing gets cropped awkwardly in the feed.

For paid campaigns, Idea ads are worth testing if your content naturally breaks into steps.

Format is only part of what decides how far a Pin travels. Relevance, engagement and the quality of the site behind it matter just as much, and how the Pinterest algorithm works explains how those signals fit together.

Is saving an Idea Pin different from saving a standard Pin?

Yes, because of how each one is built. A standard Pin is a single file, a JPG, PNG or MP4. An old Idea Pin can hold several photos and clips, each stored as its own page, so a basic save or screenshot usually only captures the first one.

LinkGrab checks the Pin type for you. Paste any public Pin link into the Pinterest downloader and it pulls every page at its original quality, with no watermark and no account. For stills only, the Pinterest image downloader keeps them as full-resolution JPG or PNG files. Our walkthrough on how to download videos from Pinterest covers the steps on each device.

One sensible caveat: saving a Pin for your own reference is one thing, but reposting someone else’s work is another. If you plan to use it publicly, read whether Pinterest downloads are legal first.

Keep the Pins worth keeping. Copy any Pin link, paste it into LinkGrab and save images, videos, GIFs and multi-page Pins in full quality. Free, with no watermark and no sign-up.

Frequently asked questions