About Us
So I never actually meant to build a public software tool. I'm a freelance graphic designer, not a coder. But last month, I was building a brand identity deck for a local coffee shop. I ended up with 14 screen-recorded videos from Pinterest sitting in my camera roll, eating up 4GB of space (I used to spend hours manually cropping out the battery icon), and I couldn't even organize them properly in Notion.
Absolute nightmare for my workflow. Seriously.
The Day My Best Mood Board Died
I think the breaking point happened about a year ago. I had this massive, curated Pinterest board. It was three years of deep-cut visual research kinetic typography, retro 90s anime loops, and brutalist web design transitions. I went to pull a reference for a pitch meeting, and literally half the board was gone. Blank gray squares everywhere.
The original creators had either deleted their accounts, or Pinterest had purged the links. Because I treated Pinterest like a hard drive instead of a discovery feed, my entire visual library just evaporated overnight. I almost cried right there at my desk.
Every "productivity guru" tells you to just organize your inspiration into native Pinterest boards. Do not do that. Pinterest boards are completely useless if you are on an airplane without Wi-Fi trying to edit a CapCut video. Or if the platform just decides your favorite pins violate some obscure new policy and poof your entire visual reference is gone.
You need the raw files in a local folder.
The Screen-Recording Nightmare
And I genuinely hate how modern social media platforms hold content hostage. They want you stuck in their app. They don't care that you just need to drop a clean looping GIF into a client presentation.
Honestly, trying to screen-record aesthetic videos on an iPhone is a joke. First of all, you get that clunky UI overlay blocking half the shot. Then you have to crop the video in your photos app, which destroys the resolution. And don't even get me started on the frame rate.
Screen-recording drops your video to a jittery 30fps and completely ruins the audio sync if you're trying to pull a sound bite (which makes zero sense from a workflow perspective, but whatever). It looks terrible when you try to drop it into a Premiere Pro timeline.
Why This Tool Exists
Basically, I got so sick of Pinterest trapping everything in a walled garden that I figured out a way to rip the raw 1080p MP4s and GIFs for my own project folders (and my own sanity). Just the raw MP4. No watermarks. No compression garbage.
Here is my exact workflow now:
- I find a video I like on the Pinterest app.
- I copy the link, paste it into Pin2mate, and download the raw MP4.
- I move the file straight to an external SSD.
- I sort everything by aesthetic category (folders like "glitch_textures" or "retro_loops").
It's way faster to reference a local folder than scrolling a Pinterest board. I left Pin2mate public because other designer friends kept asking me how I was getting clean videos without the UI overlay blocking the shot. It's fast, it works, and you don't even have to log in.
The Boring (But Important) Legal Stuff
And just to be super clear about how this works (because the legal stuff actually matters to Google and hosting platforms): Pin2mate doesn't host or store any of the content you download. It's literal transit.
When you paste a link, the tool just goes to the public Pinterest server, grabs the file, and hands it straight to your device. I don't store your files, I don't want your passwords, and I have zero access to your account.
I built this for personal mood-boarding, fair use, and local references. (Don't steal other artists' work to resell, obviously. That's just a bad look.)
Get Back to Work
If you find a bug or a pin that refuses to download, you can hit me up on the Contact page. I usually check those emails when I'm procrastinating on client revisions.
Otherwise, just keep building cool stuff.
Pinterest isn't going to suddenly start letting you export your mood boards cleanly, so extracting the files yourself is basically your only option.