Does Procare Delete Your Photos When You Leave Daycare?

When a daycare chapter is wrapping up, this question comes up fast: does Procare delete my child's photos when we leave? Here's the straight answer, including the parts that aren't fully knowable.

What's actually certain

Procare is run by your daycare, not by you. The photos and videos live on the centre's account, and your full access is tied to your child's enrolment. When you leave, your account is normally downgraded, and what's left is much harder to get to.

Whether Procare then deletes the underlying files from the centre's records, and when, depends on the daycare's own retention settings and isn't something published for parents. So I won't pretend to know their exact policy. But here's the part that matters in practice: once your account is downgraded, those photos get much harder to reach, deleted or not. Saving them means going one at a time, if you can get to them at all.

What you shouldn't assume

• That you'll have plenty of time. Some centres leave full access open a while as a courtesy; others cut it back on the last day. It's unpredictable.
• That the daycare will keep them for you. There's no obligation to, and asking staff to email a batch over usually gets you a fraction, not the full set.
• That you can sort it out later. Once the account's downgraded, there's generally no easy way back to the full set.

The safe move: save them first

The rule that never lets you down: get the photos off Procare while you still have full access.

1. On a computer, sign in at schools.procareconnect.com and check you can see the whole history, including older posts.
2. Save them at full quality. One at a time works but is slow; NurseryDownloader downloads every photo and video in one click, straight to your computer, with nothing uploaded anywhere. The first 20 are free.
3. Back the folder up in two places, a cloud account and a drive.

If you've already left and you can still see everything, that's your window, and it won't stay open for ever. Do it this week.

Related

• How to download all your Procare photos while you still have full access
• The full walkthrough: How to download all your Procare photos
• What happens to your child's photos when they leave nursery?