By the time my daughter moved up to school, her nursery had shared hundreds of photos through the app. First steps, painting disasters, that one nap where she'd fallen asleep mid-snack. Then her last day came, and a few weeks later I went to look back through them. The login still worked, but the photos were gone.
Access usually gets switched off
Apps like ParentZone, Famly and Bright Horizons FamilyApp are run by the nursery, not by you. The photos live on their account, and your access is tied to your child being on the register. When they leave, that link is usually removed.
Some nurseries give you a heads up. Plenty don't. The timing varies a lot:
- Some switch off access on the last day
- Some leave it open for a few weeks as a courtesy
- Some keep going until a system tidy-up removes old families in one go
The honest answer is you can't predict it, and you often won't get a warning. Once it's off, it's off. You can ask the nursery to email you photos, but staff are busy and what you get back is rarely everything.
The leaving PDF isn't the same as the originals
A lot of nurseries hand over a printed photo book or a PDF as a leaving gift. It's a lovely gesture and I kept ours. But it isn't a backup.
Those photos are usually compressed and shrunk to fit the page or keep the file small. They look fine on a screen at thumbnail size. Try to print one bigger than a postcard and you'll see the difference: soft edges, blocky detail, that slightly mushy look. The original on the nursery's system might be five or ten times the size of what ends up in the PDF.
So if you're picturing a canvas on the wall or a proper photo book one day, the leaving PDF won't get you there. You need the full-size files.
What to do before access ends
The simplest rule: don't wait until the last week. Get the photos off the app while you can still log in.
- Check now whether your app lets you save photos at full resolution. Saving them one by one to your phone often grabs a smaller version, so look for the original file size.
- If you're on a laptop or desktop, a browser extension like NurseryDownloader can pull the full-size originals straight to your computer in one go, rather than tapping through hundreds by hand. It works with ParentZone, Famly, Famly.de and Bright Horizons FamilyApp, and nothing gets uploaded anywhere. The free trial covers 20 downloads so you can see the quality before committing.
- Once they're on your computer, copy them somewhere safe. A cloud account and an external drive, ideally both.
If your child has already left and the app still works, treat that as borrowed time and grab everything this week. I learned the hard way that "I'll do it later" and "the login still works" don't last.
Future you, sitting down to make a photo book when they're seven, will be very glad you did.