Will Pinterest Kill The Photo Round-Up?

There are about 879 reasons that I am not the supreme ruler of the universe design blogger, but #1 with a bullet is this: I cannot STAND doing photo round-ups. Like, I FUCKING HATE THEM. 

I'm totally fine searching for one fab photo. Searching for two photos makes me angry. If I have to search for three or more photos, I wanna punch a baby directly in its face. So doing round-ups, mood boards, inspiration boards--whatever you wanna call them--that's pretty much my kryptonite.

Which isn't to say that I don't love looking at them, cause I totally do. These round-up boards have become celebrity superstars in the world of lifestyle blogging over the past few years. And some of you ppl are *seriously* good at putting those mofos together (Life's Little Jems, Mrs Lilien, and Mimi+Meg come to mind). If we're being honest, having the ability to do these round-ups, and do them well, pretty much puts you in a class above the rest in the world of blogging. It's kinda like learning to drive stick--you don't *have* to know how to do it in order to drive, but if you do, you have many more options available to you, and also you're just way the hell cooler.

image via Life's Little Jems

But the thing is, Pinterest and photo round-ups go together like Madonna and Elton John. 

Cause unless you have a board called "cool photo round-ups from around the dub dub dub," you're probably only going to want to pin a few things from most round-ups you come across. Like if you put together some killer board on gold shit, I might love 4 out of the 10 things that you pin. But I want to pin these 4 things individually, and 99.9% of the time, to different boards. Except you've got em all saved in one big jpeg-a-rooni. So then I end up having to go to each product link individually (that you have kindly provided, thank you very much), and pin it my damn self. I will always try to give credit where I can with an @notation in the description, but @hasn't worked on Pinterest since before Bieber took his paternity test. And even if it did, you're still not getting the direct traffic back to your blog that you would if I just pinned from you in the first place.

Are you picking up what I'm putting down here? 

It's a lose/lose for everyone all up in this piece. Well, except for me cause I just (re)pin all of your good shit, come up with a snappy description, get repinned to the third power, and then I end up looking like a fucking genius. 

So WTH do we do here? 

[....awkward silence....]

Cause I swear: I want ALL Y'ALL to look like the fucking geniuses.

Maybe there's some way for all you creative, round-up'y peeps to put your pretty boards together and then slice em and dice em up into individual product photos? Or you can secretly somehow embed the individual photos on your page? Or maybe some programmer can invent some snazzy, seems impossible piece of software that can help us suck all the pretty individual pictures out of one big pretty round-up picture? Or maybe photo round-ups just need to die?

All I know is, if Pinterest continues its mission to conquer and capture every single one of our brain cells (so far so good with me), we're gonna have to come up with a solution for this round-up ish right quick. 

What do you guys think?