Tasty Pins offers the functionality that allows you to hide Pinterest-specific images from your page while allowing it to show up as a pinnable image when your readers want to Pin an image from your page.
For example, on Pinch of Yum's Instant Pot Wild Rice Soup post, no Pinterest-specific image is seen in the post. But when I use the Pinterest Browser Extension to save the post to my boards, I see a Pinterest-specific image show up as an option to save:
Neat!
So the next question becomes: is this something you should be doing for your blog?
Let's talk about some pros and cons.
Reasons to add hidden Pinterest Images
Long images with text-overlay perform well on Pinterest
Creating these kinds of images that are specific to Pinterest can be worthwhile since they traditionally out-perform regular images on Pinterest.
Hiding Pinterest-specific images keeps your blog looking tidy
A lot of bloggers feel like a really long image with text overlay doesn't fit with the rest of their website. It pushes the comment form farther down the page, takes up a lot of space, and can be distracting.
Adding hidden Pinterest-specific images to your page means that you can give your readers the option to save those performant images to Pinterest, while not interfering with the aesthetics of your website.
Reasons not to add hidden Pinterest Images
Readers may save images to Pinterest by only clicking an image hover button
If your readers click an image hover button to save the post to Pinterest, they won't see the option to save your Pinterest-specific image.
In that case, you can force the hidden image through Tasty Pins so that anytime someone clicks on the hover button, they'll only have the option to Pin your Pinterest-specific image!
Visible Pinterest-specific images may encourage readers to save the post to their boards
If the Pinterest-specific image is visible in the post content, you can use it as a call-to-action to get people to save your posts to Pinterest, or even to follow you on Pinterest.
So what's the best thing to do?
The answer is… it depends! If you are more concerned with the aesthetics of your blog, then hiding your Pinterest-specific images would probably work best for you. It doesn't give the reader a call-to-action to pin that particular image, but it still gives it as an option if they use a Pinterest tool that allows selection of any image from the page, like the Pinterest Browser Extension.
Or, if you use Tasty Pins, you can force the hidden image to ensure your Pinterest-specific image gets pulled into Pinterest!
As always, do what works best for you and your blog!