After you’ve perused Pinterest for inspiration for a while, you’ll probably start noticing that people are using the same images over and over again. If you only have the free version of Canva, the stock photo options are a bit limited, but there are still a few things you can do to make stock photos look different.

How to use stock images in your Pinterest pins

In today’s post (and video) I’m going to give you some tips for setting up a Pinterest pin template, then I’ll go over the things I do to make the images I use on my Pinterest pins look different (both my own photos and stock images).

To enlarge the screen of the video, click the square icon in the bottom right hand corner of the video (it will say ‘full screen’ when you hover your mouse over the icon).

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Use Frames

First things first, let’s set up your pin template properly. Add a frame over the page in the template so you can easily just drag and drop photos in. Frames are the best part of Canva in my opinion, and are what sold me on using Canva for making all my pinnable images for Pinterest.

Frames will automatically align an image you drag and drop over it, to the centre of the frame. It speeds up your workflow by not having to resize them manually.

You can find frames under the elements menu, then search frames. A frames menu should appear below the search bar with different options. I just choose the first one (the square), then resize it to fill the template.

Pinterest recommends making a Pinterest Pin 1,000 pixels wide x 1,500 pixels high. I don’t like such large images taking up storage space on my website so I usually shrink this down to 750 pixels 1,125 pixels when I download the images. I’ve never seen a difference in the popularity of pins at the smaller image size versus the Pinterest recommended size.

How to resize anything

You can resize anything in Canva – frames, photos, text etc.

Left click on the thing you want to resize. White circles should appear on each corner of it. Click on one of these corners and drag your mouse inwards to make the thing smaller, or outwards to make the thing bigger.

How to choose text

I try and pair no more than 2-3 fonts per Pinterest pin. A mix of a bold uppercase font and a cursive font works well. For me, choosing and pairing fonts is the most time consuming part of creating a Pinterest pin.

If you want to save time, you can download a copy of the Pinterest pin templates I’ve created. I’ve experimented with around 30 different fonts to give a variety of combinations and aesthetics so it should save you plenty of time. I include a list of the fonts used in the templates for quick reference too.

Save time! The Pinterest pin templates I use for my blog are available in my shop

Now that your template is set up, let’s start finding good stock photos.

Best keywords to search for images

Some of my favorite keywords that I use to find images for my blog topic which is planners (but which could work for other niches such as blogging, online business, finance etc.) are:

Styled desktop
Girl at computer
Desktop background
Aesthetic workspace
Minimalist desk setup
Modern office setup
Organized desk
Productive workspace
Creative workstation
Office worker typing
Craft room

Tip: Add ‘white’ to your keywords to keep a clean aesthetic.

ChatGPT is helpful for generating keyword ideas to search for. It can help you create titles and descriptions for your pins too.

How to find images that match your brand

When searching for images in the elements menu of Canva, select the icon circled in the screenshot below. Color swatches will appear underneath. You can select one of the base colors such as pink, and Canva will now show you images with that shade of pink.

Those default colors are a bit too bold for me. Here is what happens when I instead click the color wheel with the plus sign (top left of the screenshot above) and choose a blush pink.

Much better options!

You can enter your brand colors if you want an even closer match. I like to choose white because I can always edit the image and tweak the colors (more on that later in this post)

How to favorite images in Canva (so you can quickly find them again)

I try and avoid favoriting too many images, otherwise I’ll be lazy and just keep using the same images over and over. But if you do want to favorite an image, hover over the image, click the 3 dots and then the star from the pop-up menu that will appear.

You can also add them to a folder from the same menu.

That same menu also tells you the name of the image and tags / keywords in the description which you can use to find more stock photos for your Pinterest pins.

If you want more options click the ‘see more like this’ button. Sometimes people upload collections of photos with different variations of the same props.

After you star an image, you can find it again under the projects menu.

Free versus pro version of Canva?

Many of the good stock photos in Canva are part of the pro version, which is one of the main reasons I think the pro version is worth it. The quality of the photos are better with more vibrant colors and less ‘fake’ looking images. Sometimes there are multiple photos of the same thing at different angles so you can find the one that’s the right fit for your Pinterest image.

You can filter between free and paid photos by clicking the button on the right of the search menu within the elements (and the fonts) menu.

If a photo has a crown icon over the top, then that is an image that is free with the pro version of Canva, otherwise you’ll have to pay if you want to download the design you have used that element in (typically $1).

Once you’ve found your stock photos, here are some ways you can make them look different.

1. Crop the image

Cropping part of the image can make it look like an entirely new image.

Click on the image, click the square icon that will appear on the menu above.

Then click the white rectangles in the middle of each side of the image to crop.

2. Add more space to an image so you can put text on top of it

Double click on an image you’ve placed on your frame on your template. That will bring up a crop menu. You can crop it to make space to add text under or beneath the image. Or you can left click with your mouse and drag the photo to reposition it on the frame to create room to add text.

The same image, just cropped to look a bit different:

3. Change the transparency of an image

Sometimes I like to add a box over an image on a Pinterest pin (which I then add the title text into), but reduce the transparency of the box to see more of the image underneath. On the other hand, if you want the image to be less prominent and more of a background, you can reduce the transparency of any image.

After adding the image to your template, click on the image and choose the gradient checkerboard image from the pop up menu. A slider will appear, or you can type numbers to reduce the transparency (100% is it’s original form with no transparency applied).

This works for any image from the Canva image library, well as your own images that you’ve uploaded into Canva.

Here’s the link if you want to read the post for the pin I was creating: 50 Themes for your planner or bullet journal spreads

4. Edit tool – filters

Click on an image, select edit from the menu that appears at the top, and a new menu on the right will appear.

You can choose different filters and drag the intensity slider up and down to change the look of the image. I find this makes the most difference if you choose a stock image that doesn’t have a lot of white in the background.

For more control over the color, you could add a rectangle, make it a color that stands out on Pinterest (e.g. pink), place this over the top of the image, then change the transparency. This method is also better if you want to add the color to multiple images as you can just copy and paste the colored rectangle between images.

A different approach is to choose the monochrome filter. Not many people use black and white so it should stand out in the Pinterest feed.

Some of the stock photos can be adjusted further if you don’t mind spending the time editing them. Click on the image then go to ‘adjust’. Within that menu you can edit things like brightness, contrast, highlights, shadows, color vibrance and some of the Canva stock photos will even let you change the color of part of the image.

I showed how to do this at 13:35 min into the video above, when I changed the girl in the stock photo’s leggings from blue to pink.

5. Add more white space

Canva’s pro plan has a Magic Expand tool which you can use if you need to add a bit more space onto an image (especially if you want to add text right onto the image but there isn’t enough blank space).

This one is hard to show in screenshots in a blog post, so take a look at the video I’ve included above (starts at 6:35 min into the video).

6. Add props to the image

If an image has a lot of white space, you can add props to the image 2 ways:

Use Canva’s Magic Edit tool
Use the elements menu

Both of these are hard to explain via text. I show how to do these at 7:55 min in the above video.

7. Add elements over the top

Here’s an example of a Pinterest pin with some shapes added over the top of the stock image. It makes text heavy pins a bit more interesting.

Go to Elements and search ‘irregular shape’ under graphics.

Done for you Pinterest pin templates

Apply what you’ve learned in this post and save the setup time by using my Pinterest pin templates. I originally made one set of 50 pins but decided I needed even more (supposed to pin 20+ times a day to get any traction…), so I made two sets each with 50 pin templates to customise.

Each set includes a variety of designs and can be used for any type of content: information, call to action, if you have a freebie option, for use with stock images or your own images etc.

I also include a list of all of the fonts I’ve used within the template for quick reference.

if you’d like more info, here are the links: