Archiving stuff online with Pinterest is so convenient that I tend to hoard interesting articles, pretty doodles, and inspirational decor photos, without thinking much about how I would refer to them later.  It’s like piling up stuff in my storeroom, when I don’t know when I will use them, where to keep them, but I know I don’t want to lose them.  However, this Pinterest store room is so big, it doesn’t get completely filled up, so I might ended up not able to find the things I want when I decided to look for them later. To make things worse, when you eventually found that particular article, the website/blog/link has expired.  I stopped for quite a while as I found it pretty meaningless to be keeping photos after photos with expired links.  But lately, I started to pin more home decor photos to keep them on my board, even after the website has shut down.  Beautifully styled homes are still a pleasure to look at, for some reason, they are still retrievable on my boards, even though the links are gone, I’ll accept the second best option in this case.

Took a moment this morning to go through my pins, carried out a bit of decluttering and here’s what I determine to do to make my pins more archive worthy.

/ Fashion Pins
I am not pinning them so that I can get the exact items featured.  They sort of remind myself of the style that I prefer and not to be carried away by trends or sale events and end up with things that I cannot use or wear often.

What I changed : I used to have different categories like bags, shoes, hats, etc, but I have merged them into one “Lookbook” board.  I hardly pin single clothing item anyway, and it’s the overall style that I like to keep on my board.  The “Forever Summer” swimwear/beachwear board became a health + body inspiration board peppered with bikini clad women in between for ‘motivation’.

/ Home & Decor Pins
Again, it is not a catalog book with photos of beautiful homes for me to buy the things off from.  Instead, I use them to inspire me to clean up (this bright bathroom and an empty countertop is enough to spur me into a cleaning mode!), or dress up my rooms with existing items that I already have around the house (a simple display of chopboards? a jar for my wooden utensils? shift some small plants and display them by the window?)

What I changed : Not much.  I still find it useful to have a separate boards for various part of the house, i,e, “Kitchen”, “Living Rooms”, “Bathrooms”.  I added an “Eateries” board to take note of cafe kitchens and dining area decor.

/ Recipe Pins
This is what I refer to most often, and also upset me the most when the link is lost.  Nothing much I can do either, except trying them out sooner and eventually archiving the recipes here.

What I changed : Nothing.  Still the 4 boards :  one for meat dishes, another with meat-free recipes, third for baking breads, cakes, cookies, pies and last one for drinks and desserts.

/ The How-To’s Pins
I limited myself to just 3 : Uncluttering Ideas (For all things neat, clean and simple), Crafting Ideas, Printables (Crafting/Organizing ideas with downloadable printables).

/ The Inspirational Pins
I used to have a few for photography, travelling, pretty illustrations, food styling, inspirational quotes, and fonts collection.  I kept the photography tips and fonts collection, dump the rest and merged the illustrations/poster designs into one single board.  See how things go.

/ The Zakka Pins
The knick knacks of all sorts.  Keeping it.

& I’m done! Off to more pinning here!