Pinterest adds better organizational tools for your online mood boards

Every Pinterest user at some point has sifted through their boards, found something they pinned a while ago, and wondered why they ever saved it in the first place. That might be more true than ever now that Pinterest is seeing usage spike: the company reported a 35% increase in the number of monthly boards created in the last six months and a nearly equivalent bump in the number of collaborative boards made. To help its more active users wrangle their “visual inspiration” more easily -- and to keep moments like the one I’ve described from happening too often -- Pinterest has rolled out a handful of new organizational tools.

For one, you can now add private “notes to self” to anything to Pins, in case whatever you just saved could benefit from a little extra context. If you routinely work with boards with over 150 Pins, you’ll now also see a new board toolbar that offers quick access to all the actions you can take, including options for better organizing your Pins or diving into the notes you’ve left on them. Perhaps most important is the ability to mark certain Pins as favorites within a board -- once you’ve done that a few times, you can sort the board to have those items displayed first.

That you couldn’t leave yourself private notes or sort boards by your preferred Pins already seems rather silly in hindsight, but hey -- better late than never, we suppose. Here’s hoping these additions wind up working out well for frazzled holiday shoppers the booming number of users Pinterest believes are planning for the births of their quarantine babies.(Their words, not ours.) For now, these updates are mainly mobile-focused, but we’ll update this story once we start to see these changes go live across Pinterest.com more broadly.