Graduation & changing schools
Leaving daycare? Save your Procare photos before your account is deactivated.
The last day is coming: kindergarten, a new center, a move across town. Everyone remembers the goodbye party. Almost nobody remembers that the photos from the past two years are about to disappear from their phone.
What happens to your account when your child leaves
Your Procare Connect login exists because your child is enrolled. When they graduate or change centers, the center closes out the enrollment and deactivates your parent account. Sometimes that happens the same day; sometimes a few weeks later when the director gets to the paperwork. Either way, one morning the app asks you to log in and your password doesn’t work anymore.
Once that happens, the photos are no longer accessible to you. They may still exist on the center’s side, but the feed you scrolled every evening, with every drop-off photo, finger painting, and playground triumph, is closed. The app never offered an export, so unless you saved photos one at a time as they came in, this is the moment they’re lost. Most parents searching for “procare account deactivated photos” are searching a week too late.
This isn’t the center being careless. Deactivating old parent accounts is how they keep other families’ photos private. It just means the job of keeping your own child’s photos falls to you, and it has a deadline.
The timeline
Here is how to save Procare photos before leaving daycare without a scramble on the final afternoon.
- 2 weeks before
Back up everything
Install the extension, log in to Procare, pick your child, and download the full feed. Open the ZIP and scroll through it. If the first-day photo is there, you're set.
- Last week
Run it again
The final week is when centers post the most: the party, the certificate, the goodbye hugs. Re-run the download and it fetches only what's new, in seconds.
- After the last day
Keep the ZIP in two places
Your computer plus one more: an external drive, a cloud folder you already use, or a family member's machine. The photos are ordinary files now; treat them like the rest of your family archive.
The one-click method
Saving 1,000+ photos by hand from the Procare app means opening each one and tapping save, a weekend of work most families never finish. Daycare Photo Download does the same thing automatically, in a few minutes.
- Install the Chrome extension from the Chrome Web Store and paste in the license key from your purchase email.
- Log in to Procare like normal at schools.procareconnect.com. The password goes to Procare’s own login page, never to us.
- Click the extension and pick your child. One ZIP of every full-resolution photo and video, named by date, lands in your Downloads folder.
Photos download directly to your computer; nothing passes through our servers, and there’s no account with us. Re-run it in the final week and it only fetches the new photos. The step-by-step version is in our guide to downloading all photos from Procare.
A note for daycare directors
If you run a center, you have had the phone call: a parent, a month after graduation, asking whether there’s any way to get the photos back. It is an awkward call, and it’s avoidable. Add a line to your graduation packet or your last-week email: “Your Procare parent account will be deactivated after your child’s last day. Save your photos first.” Feel free to link this page. Every family that backs up before the deadline is one fewer request you can’t fulfil.
Nothing about the download changes anything on your side. It reads what the parent’s own account can already see, and it stops working the moment you deactivate the account, exactly as it should.
Questions parents ask
- My Procare account was already deactivated. Are the photos gone?
- From your side, yes. A deactivated parent account can't see the feed, and no download tool can see it for you. Your only option is to ask the center directly whether they can share anything. That's why this page exists: run the backup before the last day.
- How long before the last day should I do this?
- Two weeks out is comfortable. It gives you time to install, run, and check the ZIP, and to run it again in the final week for the last photos. Even the night before is fine; the download takes minutes.
- Will it get the graduation-day photos?
- If they're posted while your account is still active, yes. Run it once more after the last day's photos appear and it will fetch only the new ones.
- My other child is still enrolled. Does that change anything?
- Your parent account usually stays active while a sibling is enrolled, but the graduating child's feed may be closed on its own. Back up that child's feed before the transition either way.
- Is this an official Procare tool?
- No. Daycare Photo Download is made by Beach Street Labs LLC and is not affiliated with Procare Solutions. It only downloads what your own account can already see.
- What does it cost?
- $20 a year, all children on your account, photos and videos. If a renewal goes through for a year you didn't use, email us and we refund it, no questions asked.