Pinterest released the “nopin” HTML meta tag in 2012 so websites could opt out of having their images pinned.
The tag was introduced on February 20, 2012, during a period when Pinterest faced growing questions about copyright and the copying of images. A site could add Pinterest’s opt-out instruction to its HTML, signaling that its content should not be selected for pinning through Pinterest’s tools.
The change gave publishers a way to express a site-wide preference rather than relying only on individual users or copyright complaints. Flickr adopted the code shortly afterward, on February 24, showing that the mechanism was relevant to large image-hosting platforms as well as ordinary websites.
“Nopin” is easy to confuse with later Pinterest controls. The original page-level form used a meta element such as `<meta name="pinterest" content="nopin">`; Pinterest also later documented image-level attributes, including `data-pin-nopin`. These related controls serve the same broad purpose but are not identical implementations.