Pinterest launches ‘Place Pins’ — a map overlay for your travel pins

Wondering where that beautiful tunnel of ivy everyone is pinning actually lives? Now Pinterest will let you attach pins to a map, showing exactly where you can find the real thing.

The feature is called “place pins,” and you can use them by creating a “place board.” All you have to do is create a regular board and select “add a map.”

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The feature is meant to be an aid to travel planning (or hopeful wishing). There are 750 million pins of amazing pools, beautiful beaches, adorable houses, inspiring landscapes, all sorts of architecture, and a lot more places and things people want to see someday, according to Pinterest. The map feature gives people a more beautiful way of showing off these desires.

Friends can collaboratively work with you on these boards as well, in case you’re planning a big road trip or a European adventure together.

And it could actually come in handy even if not used on a travel board. I often come across pins of beautiful places and click through only to find that it comes from a captionless Tumblr page with little to no extra information about the place. If the pinner knows where this pin is in the world, they could attach it to the map, giving future pinners a little more to work with.

Pinterest released a series of examples of trip boards created by travel brands. Four Seasons Hotels made a board titled “gastronomic travel” with 86 pins of food destinations around the world. National Geographic created a board about family travel, and Conde Nast presented a guide to Italy.

Beware of these boards, however. They will make you want to get up from your computer and hightail it to the nearest airport. They could also be bad news for the hordes of travel startups out there with various approaches to travel inspiration and trip planning (Mygola, Plnnr, Utrip, Touristeye, TripAdvisor, Gogobot, Wanderfly, Vayable, and TripIt, to name a few).

Pinterest has become a mainstay piece of social media. The company recently raised $225 million and is valued at $3.8 billion. It has 70 million users and attracts 2.5 billion page views a month.

Additional reporting by Rebecca Grant.