Does Procare Delete Your Photos When You Leave Daycare?

Procare doesn't publish a photo-retention policy for parents, so nobody outside your daycare can tell you exactly how long your child's photos will stay. What Procare's help center does say is that parents of a child marked Inactive or Graduate can still log in and view their child's information, but your daycare controls that status and your login, so the safe move is to save every photo and video now, in one go.

What Procare's help center says

Procare's support site is written mostly for the daycares that run it, and a few of its pages answer the leaving question for you:

• Leaving changes your child's status, not the photos. When a center marks a student Inactive or Graduate, Procare's help page says parents can still log into the app and view their child's information. The center can no longer send that student messages.
• The center controls who is connected. Staff can add, edit or delete parents on a child's record.
• The center chooses what you see. "Each school selects which activities to share with parents," says Procare's parent guide to daily activities.

What we couldn't find anywhere is a stated retention period for photos after a child leaves, or a promise of how long a former family stays connected. We'd rather say that plainly than guess.

What parents actually run into

The photos are rarely the thing that disappears first. The hard part is getting them out.

• The feed shows a month at a time. Procare's parent guide says the activity feed loads the last four weeks, and older activities appear only when you click Load More Activities at the end of the feed. Two or three years of daycare is a lot of clicking.
• There's no bulk download for parents in Procare's parent help pages. Even the center's own photo gallery is documented as hover, click the download icon, save, one photo at a time.
• Parents notice when it's time to move on. One parent who wrote up their own workaround did it as their son moved to a new school for kindergarten, because the app has no bulk download at all.

So once your child leaves, Procare becomes a smaller, downgraded account that your daycare manages, and the photos are no easier to get out than they were before.

Save every Procare photo in one go

NurseryDownloader is a Chrome extension that saves every photo and video from Procare to your computer.

1. Install it. On a laptop or desktop, open Chrome or Microsoft Edge and add NurseryDownloader from the Chrome Web Store. It doesn't run on phones or tablets.
2. Sign in to Procare at schools.procareconnect.com and stay on your dashboard, the activity feed you see after signing in.
3. Click download. In the NurseryDownloader panel at the top right of the page, click Download all photos & videos.

From the dashboard, one run covers every child on your Procare account, saved into a folder for each month, with the date at the start of every filename. Videos come down with the photos, and it reaches back to the older photos too, not just the last four weeks. Your first 20 downloads are free, so you can check the quality before you buy a license.

Your photos go straight from Procare to your computer and never pass through our servers. It never asks for your Procare password, because it works in your own browser, where you're already signed in.

The full step-by-step is in our Procare photo download guide.

Questions parents ask

How long will I keep access after we leave?

That's up to your daycare. Procare's documentation says parents of Inactive or Graduate students can still sign in, and it also lets centers remove a parent from a child's record. Ask the director if you'd like a date, and save the photos either way.

Can the daycare export everything for me?

Procare's own documentation shows staff saving gallery photos one at a time, so a full set is a big job for a busy center. You can ask, but doing it yourself is quicker and gets you every original.

I have two children at the daycare. Do I run it twice?

No. Start from the dashboard and one run saves every child on your account into their own folder. If you start on one child's photo page instead, it saves just that child.

Does it save the daily reports and notes?

No. It saves the photos and videos, sorted by child and date. Meals, naps and written notes stay in Procare.

Can I do this on my phone?

No. Chrome extensions only run on a computer, so use Chrome or Edge on a Windows PC, Mac or Chromebook. Sign in with the same Procare account you use on your phone.

Related

• How to download all your Procare photos and videos
• What happens to your child's photos when they leave daycare?