pinterest-api

node client for the unofficial API to get pins and boards from a Pinterest user. Note that due to limitations in the unofficial API, this app will retrieve at most 50 pins per board.

Thanks to github user TakeTwoMerkidentiteit for making his/her PHP client for the unofficial Pinterest API, from which I roughly ported most of the methods (https://github.com/TakeTwoMerkidentiteit/Pinterest-API)

To install:

npm install pinterest-api

Methods

// import
var pinterestAPI = require('pinterest-api');
 
// Create a new object and set the accountname
var pinterest = pinterestAPI(accountName);
 
// Get pins from a board (second parameter determines whether you want the results paginated and to include some metadata)
pinterest.getPinsFromBoard(boardName, true, function (pins) {
    ...
});
 
// Get all pins
pinterest.getPins(function (pins) {
    ...
});
 
// Get all boards (first parameter determines whether you want the results pagined and to include some metadata)
pinterest.getBoards(true, function (boards) {
    ...
});
 
// Get data for pins (note that this is a static method (a method of the class itself) since it does not rely on any state)
pinterestAPI.getDataForPins(arrayOfPinIds, function (data) {
    ...
});

The API returns all data with meta data. The results are 'paginated' but the default data per page is all the data. This is because given the 50 pin max per board limitation mentioned above, I don't think actual pagination will really be needed. However, the setting can be changed easily:

pinterest.setItemsPerPage(50); // Set itemsPerPage to 50 (default is fitting all items on the first page, set this to null for if you change this and want to get back to default behavior)

If you need to change pages:

pinterest.setCurrentPage(2); // Set current page to 2

If you want to get the itemsPerPage and currentPage settings:

pinterest.getItemsPerPage();
pinterest.getCurrentPage();

Cache

There is a very simple file caching system in place. The script will try to create the ./cache if it doesn't exist directory so be sure that your permissions have been set right.

Returned Data

The API returns an object. Below is an example (remember that items_per_page is null by default, and just means all data will be on first page).

Note that the unofficial Pinterest API does not return dates, so we use the boards RSS feeds to get as many dates as possible and add them to the data objects. If the date fields are empty strings, it just means we could not get them. Currently working on internally scraping pin pages to get dates from the HTML.

{
    total_items: 500,
    items_per_page: null,
    total_pages: 1,
    current_page: 1,
    data: [
        {
            attribution: null,
            description: "10 Misverstanden over Het Nieuwe Werken - News - Het Nieuwe Werken",
            pinner: {
                about: "Wij zijn een full-service bureau voor interieurprojecten. Wij ontwerpen, realiseren managen turn-key creatieve en duurzame interieurs.",
                location: "Utrecht",
                full_name: "Rever Interieurprojecten",
                follower_count: 48,
                image_small_url: "http://media-cache-ec0.pinimg.com/avatars/reverinspiratie_1393949212_30.jpg",
                pin_count: 525,
                id: "506444058005094518",
                profile_url: "http://www.pinterest.com/reverinterieur/"
            },
            repin_count: 0,
            dominant_color: "#eff7ee",
            like_count: 0,
            link: "https://cbreprojects.nl/hetnieuwewerken/news/detail/spread-propertynl/",
            images: {
                237x: {
                    url: "http://media-cache-ec0.pinimg.com/237x/1e/5d/e7/1e5de7f618686727bd373f8b032280bd.jpg",
                    width: 237,
                    height: 101
                }
            },
            embed: null,
            is_video: false,
            id: "506443920570421590",
            created_at: Tue Feb 12 2013 09:44:33 GMT-0800 (PST),
            created_at_source: 'rss'
        },
        [...]
    ]
}

Misc

The JSON for each pin that pinterest gives us does not include the date that the pin was created. Therefore, we use a combination of RSS feeds and scraping to get the dates of the pins. However, the accuracy of all dates are not equivalent. The dates obtained from the RSS feeds are accurate, but the dates from scraping have to be inferred based on the 'time ago' text that pinterest shows on the page (i.e. 3 weeks ago). We took the conservative approach of assigning the earliest possible date that could apply to the 'time ago' text. In the '3 weeks ago' example, our date would be 1 second before 4 weeks prior to the current date (the date of the app running) because Pinterest always rounds down when between dates (i.e. if actual date was 3.8 weeks ago, it'd say 3 weeks ago rather than 4 weeks ago). As the accuracy of the date may be important, a 'created_at_source' property on the pin object to show whether the source was rss or html.

Note that having to scrape for many pins may take some time, so if you don't care about having the date returned with each pin object, you can turn dates off:

pinterest.setObtainDates(false);

You can see the current state of obtainDates with:

pinterest.getObtainDates();