Why I built NurseryDownloader

When my eldest left her first nursery, they printed us a PDF of her photos as a leaving gift. Kind thought. The photos were also tiny, blurry, and about a tenth the size of the originals. That PDF is the reason this whole thing exists.

I've got three kids. The first one's nursery used ParentZone, and over a couple of years they'd shared hundreds of photos. First wobbly steps, a birthday cake she face-planted into, an afternoon nap I still go back to. I'd glance at them on my phone and think, lovely, I'll save those properly one day.

The night the penny dropped

One day turned out to be the week she left.

I sat down with the leaving PDF, ready to feel sentimental, and instead felt my stomach drop. The pictures were soft and mushy. Fine at thumbnail size, useless for anything bigger than a postcard. Then I realised the proper versions, the full-size originals sitting on the nursery's system, were about to disappear when our login got switched off.

So I did the only thing I could think of. I opened the app on my laptop and started saving photos one at a time. Right click, save, right click, save. Hundreds of them, at midnight, while the kettle went cold next to me. It took most of an evening and I'm fairly sure I missed some.

It worked, just about. But it was daft. I'm not a particularly patient person, and clicking the same three buttons three hundred times is the sort of thing a computer should be doing, not a tired dad.

So I built the thing I wished I'd had

By the time my second started at a nursery using Famly, I'd had enough of doing it by hand. I write software for a living, so one weekend I built a little Chrome extension to grab the photos for me. The idea was simple:

• One click instead of hundreds
• The full-size originals, not the shrunk versions you get saving to a phone
• Straight to my own computer, with nothing uploaded anywhere

The second time around, getting every photo took one click and a cup of tea. That difference, an evening of clicking versus a single button, is the whole point.

I showed it to a few other parents at pickup and they wanted it too. So I tidied it up, made it work with ParentZone, Famly and Bright Horizons FamilyApp, then with Lillio, KinderCare, Procare and a few others as parents asked, and put it out into the world as NurseryDownloader.

What it actually does, honestly

It's a Chrome extension for laptops and desktops, Windows or Mac. Not phones or tablets, because the saving-one-by-one problem is a computer problem. You log into your nursery app like normal, it pulls the full-size original photos down to your machine, and that's it. Your photos never leave your computer. Nothing gets uploaded to me or anyone else, which matters to me as a parent as much as anything.

It saves videos too, alongside the photos, at the size they were uploaded. The first 20 downloads are free so you can check the quality before you decide. A licence is £19.99 for a year and it doesn't auto-renew, because I hate sneaky renewals as much as you do.

I didn't set out to build a product. I set out to stop losing my own kids' photos. The fact it now saves other parents that same midnight clicking session is the best bit. If you've got a leaving date coming up, don't be me with the kettle going cold. Grab them while you still can.