Xplor Home photos: how to save them all, not just one at a time

If your child's centre uses Xplor, you'll know Xplor Home: the feed of moments, photos and videos from your child's day. It's lovely to scroll through. It's much less lovely when you want to keep all of it.

Here are the three ways to get your photos out of Xplor Home, and when each one makes sense.

1. Save them one at a time

On the web, you can open each photo and save it. For a handful of favourites that's fine. For a year or two of daycare it means hundreds of clicks, and you'll end up with files named in no useful order.

2. The learning gallery archive email

The Xplor Home app can email you an archive of the media your child has been tagged in. It can take a few hours to arrive, so it's worth requesting well before you need it.

Because it's based on tags, check whether it includes everything you were expecting. Photos shared to the whole room, rather than tagged to your child, may not be in it.

3. One-click download to your computer

NurseryDownloader is a Chrome extension that works with Xplor Home on the web, using the login you already have. One click saves the photos and videos from your child's moments straight to your computer:

• A folder for each child, then one for each month.
• The date at the start of every filename.
• Only your own children. It never saves photos of other children at the centre.
• Run it again later and it only fetches what's new.

One honest note: Xplor plays some videos as a stream rather than storing them as a file. Those can't be saved as a video you keep, so the extension skips them and tells you how many there were, rather than saving a broken file.

Do it while you still have access

What you can see in a centre's app can change once your child leaves, and the centre isn't keeping a copy for you. Save everything while your child is still enrolled, then back it up somewhere else as well.

Read the step-by-step guide to downloading your Xplor photos.