pincushion

pincushion is a command line tool for creating archives for resources on Historypin. It reads data from the Historypin API and writes a static website to a given directory. The resulting file structure looks something like:

archive
├── collections
│   ├── my-collection
│   │   ├── image.jpg
│   │   └── index.html
│   ├── my-other-collection
│   │   ├── image.jpg
│   │   └── index.html
│   └── my-last-collection
│       ├── image.jpg
│       └── index.html
├── data.json
├── index.html
├── pins
│   ├── 123 
│   │   ├── image.jpg
│   │   └── index.html
│   ├── 456
│   │   ├── image.jpg
│   │   └── index.html
│   ├── 789 
│   │   ├── image.jpg
│   │   └── index.html
│   ├── 1001 
│   │   ├── index.html
│   │   └── media.mp3
│   └── 2112
│       ├── index.html
│       └── media.mp4
└── user.jpg

Each pin has its own directory, which contains the uploaded media (image, audio or video). The data.json file is an aggregation of JSON data collected from the Historypin API, which is used to create the static site.

Install

pip install pincushion

Use

Create an archive for user 11670:

pincushion user --user-id 11670 --archive-path my-archive

Open the my-archive/index.html file in your browser.

Similarly you can create an archive for a "collection" as long as the collection contains sub-collections:

pincushion collection --slug 2025-summer-institute --archive-path my-collection