Is Pinterest not a useful tool? I would say that it probably generates a lot of value for its hundreds of millions of users, and that value does not come from the source of the image, but of the image itself, and its relation to other similar images.
Pinterest is useful for the purpose you describe but what seems to have happened is they are dominating organic search for images in contravention of google's own guidelines.
All things being equal, Pinterest should have been penalised into non-existence by now?
It's not one bit useful for people busy searching an image that they SEO their way above other images, only to be met with a login wall I'm not gonna fill out.
