Can I Use This Pinterest Image?

Quick answer: No. A picture on Pinterest still belongs to whoever owns it. Pinterest’s Terms say the person who posts a picture keeps all rights in it, and they let Pinterest’s users save and share it on Pinterest. Saving a Pin to your board is what Pinterest is for. Using the picture anywhere else, such as your blog, Instagram or a product you sell, means asking the person who owns it. Pick your case above to see Pinterest’s own words for it.

How to use it

1. Say where the picture came from: you found it on Pinterest, you don’t know who made it, you have a licence for it, or you made it yourself.
2. Tick what you want to do with it. Save it, download it for yourself, upload it as your own Pin, put it on your blog, post it on another network, or print it on something you sell.
3. Read the answer for each one. Every card quotes the lines of Pinterest’s Terms, Copyright policy or Community Guidelines that speak to it, with where they come from. Under them is our advice, marked as ours.

What Pinterest’s Terms say about pictures

The picture stays its owner’s. Section 3a of the Terms says: You retain all rights in, and are solely responsible for, the User Content you post to Pinterest. Its plain-words summary: If you post your Content on Pinterest, it still belongs to you.

Posting it lets Pinterest’s users save it. Section 3b gives Pinterest and our users a licence to the content people post, and sums it up as: If you post your User Content on Pinterest, we can show it to people and others can use it and save it. That is why saving a Pin is what the Terms describe. But a licence can only come from someone who has the rights, and plenty of Pins are posted by people who don’t own the picture.

Posting needs the rights. Section 3a again: You will only post User Content that you have the rights to post, and you won’t post User Content that infringes the intellectual property rights of others. The Community Guidelines say the same in one line: Don’t infringe anyone's intellectual property, privacy or other rights.

These lines come from the Terms in force since 30 April 2025. The version Pinterest has published to start on 12 November 2026 keeps every one of them word for word.

Saving, downloading, re-pinning and selling

• Saving a Pin to your board is what Pinterest’s Terms describe. Save the original Pin rather than a copy, so it keeps the link back to the person who posted it.
• Downloading for yourself, such as a phone wallpaper or a reference for your own drawing: the users’ licence in the Terms lists “download”, but the person who posted the Pin may not be the picture’s owner. Keep it private.
• Uploading it as your own Pin needs the rights. The Copyright policy says that if your account has content removed after too many copyright infringement reports, you could lose the ability to save Pins on Pinterest, or have the account disabled.
• Your blog, Instagram, a product you sell: Pinterest’s Terms speak about Pinterest. Outside it, the picture is its owner’s, so ask them first. A picture that shows a brand, a logo or a character needs that owner’s permission too.

If it’s your picture

Pinterest’s Copyright policy gives owners a route: If you’re a copyright owner or authorized to act on behalf of one, you can report alleged copyright infringements on Pinterest by completing a copyright report and sending it to our designated copyright agent. For a picture copied many times, the policy says to start the report by asking Pinterest to remove all Pins that contain the image, and warns that it can only find identical copies: a resized or edited copy is not found that way. Anyone who owns the exclusive copyright can also apply for Pinterest’s Content Claiming Portal, which Pinterest reviews application by application.

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