I was going to use oliboards for my mood board but found it too tedious to upload all my photos. You can, however, upload your own photos. And that might be a good option. I am lucky enough to have taken graphic design in high school so I just put all my images together in Photoshop but I am sure a more basic program would work too. Copy and paste. Copy and paste - resize, move a little... Voila!

With Pinterest you can gather any picture online to one of your boards, including photos you have uploaded to a site like Picasa. You can have/name as many different boards as you want.

After joining Pinterest, you add a "pin it" button to your web browser and click it whenever there's something on a page you want to save. Then the picture you have pinned links back to the original source when you click it.

I have found it to be a great tool for inspiration pictures and those "where did I see that (fill in the blank) I need to get?" moments. It is addictive though.

Just save the pics of your items into a file and open up Paint. You can select the size of the board under Attributes, and then under "Edit" select "Paste from" and that will open up the dialogue box with you selecting your file. You can then resize it to something appropriate and move it around the board. You can fill the background with a color or leave it white. If you haven't used Paint before, it might take you a couple of minutes to get the hang of it, but since Paint is included on almost every Windows computer, it's probably the easiest and simplest way to manipulate your images.

Then of course you load the image to your photo hosting site and use the HTML to post it here.

I just figured it out last weekend so I could post on the last "design around this" thread. I used Olioboard. You don't have to use only the products on that site, you can 'capture' any picture off the internet and bring it in. It took me a couple of hours to figure out - I will admit that DH helped me navigate. I still don't know my way around terribly well. You can also use Photobucket or Flickr I think. If you opt to go with Olioboard (it is free) just let me know and I can walk you through it.

I used Powerpoint in much the same manner as LWO describes for Paint.

I don't have Photoshop, so I drop them into Powerpoint and save it as a jpeg.

Thanks. I'll have to try some of these ideas.

I signed up for Pinterest and they sent me an email saying I am on the waiting list. Anticipation....

I'll give powerpoint a shot in the meantime.

A tip on Powerpoint: when you've got a photo selected, there's a toolbar that pops up. You can crop the edges down of course, also brighten/darken (not shift yellow/blue lighting tones, unfortunately). The thing I used a lot was the little pen icon (looks kind of like a hiliter or magic wand), that you click the solid-color background of an icon (like a faucet photo or catalog image) and it makes the background transparent. So I could put my faucet overlapped on my sink, overlapped on my granite sample.

If you're at all handy with graphics programs, there's a free program called Gimp that's similar to PhotoShop. I use a very old version (no longer available) of Paint Shop Pro that's also similar. Gimp (and PSPro) supports layers, which I really like for creating idea boards - it's easy to change up options. They're also very good for editing - taking out backgrounds, changing brightness/contrast, etc.

Here is a link that might be useful: Gimp

When I signed up this summer I waited about 4-5 days to get a Pinterest approval. It felt like forever. I hope it goes much faster for you!