Using Pinterest as a costume research tool

June 16, 2012

Time Travels on Pinterest

Last night my friend Cindy convinced me to start up a Pinterest board to hold all my photos for my costume research. The most important reason would be to save them if my computer crashed and I lost everything. Since this has happened twice in the past, and my albums are bursting at the seams, it seemed a logical step. I honestly did try to save them to a disk periodically but they got too big for the disks. I also printed them on paper and kept them in notebooks. Both of those ideas are about 3 years behind and the idea of saving more of them, this time to a thumb drive, was very overwhelming.

Recently I heard a little blurb on the news about the Cloud where you could upload your photos and save them. I’m slightly familiar with the Cloud, since I know that’s where my books on my Kindle are saved. But I wasn’t able to find out how to even get started on it. So for right now, Pinterest seems an easy start.

Except being easy doesn’t mean quick, especially when I probably have over 5000 photos saved. I thought I had even more but remembered many of these are duplicated when I’m working on specific gowns and I copy them all to the folder for that gown.

Pinterest doesn’t seem to have written instructions on how to set one up. In fact it’s very mysterious where you have to have an invitation from someone to “join” it. Cindy was very patient with me for an hour it took me to set mine up and figure out how to just get started. It reminds me of Facebook where everything is so cryptic. It didn’t surprise me that it has some connections to FB. At least mine did.

After finally getting my first photo, and my first follower, Cindy, uploaded, I went to bed. Except it took me over an hour to get to sleep because my brain was still trying to figure this thing out. First thing this morning I began setting up albums on Pinterest and uploading some photos. So far I’ve only got 4 albums and about 20 photos uploaded to each. I have so many more but wanted to get at least get it going.

In my introduction, I started to explain my purpose of my collection of photos, but they limit the number of words you can upload. So basically I find and save photos from the internet and many off of ebay of gowns and accessories that appeal to me, or to educate me on the styles of each time period. Sometimes it’s just a collar or a lapel, a hat or the entire dress. I also save photos showing fabrics of the time, either from catalogs or extant gowns, in hopes that it educates my eye in picking fabrics when I shop.

I’ve been collecting these photos for almost 10 years, and most of them I never recorded where I found them. My most important criteria was the year. But some of them are just generic showing the 1800s, etc. Because I’ve learned how to recognize the years better, I’ve been able to correct those dates now. But I’m sure many are still wrong. I’ve been lazy looking through them.  So enjoy what I have so far. There’s much more to come.   http://pinterest.com/timetravels/