Your child spent three years at nursery. Every week new photos appeared in the parent app: the first go in the sandpit, dressed up for carnival, asleep at the lunch table. Hundreds of moments you never saw, because you were at work.
Then the contract ends. Your child starts school, the account is closed, and those photos are gone.
This is not a theoretical risk
The providers say so themselves. The help pages of Konnect, the parent app many Dutch childcare organisations use, advise you to download your favourite photos along the way, explaining that once the childcare contract has ended it is no longer possible to fetch everything in one go.
From their side that makes sense: they are an administration system for the nursery, not an archive for you. It does mean the responsibility lies with you, and the deadline is fixed while nobody puts it in your diary.
How to get your photos out
Nearly every parent portal has an export option. It is rarely easy to find, though, and on a phone it is often more limited than on a computer. Use a laptop if you can.
Konnect / OuderApp
Open the photo album and tap the download icon in the top right. Choose a period and which child it is for, then tap "Send download link". Within about fifteen minutes you'll receive an email with a link that saves every photo from that period in one go.
Choose a generous period. One export covering three years is less work than six exports of six months each.
BasisOnline
Open the photo album on a computer. Do not select anything and click "Download photos" straight away, and you'll get the complete album as a zip file. If you select individual photos first, you'll only get those.
Bitcare and other portals
The Bitcare parent app lets you save and share photos one at a time or per series. A proper bulk export is sometimes missing; in that case, work through the album month by month. Tedious, but you only have to do it once.
If you get stuck, email the nursery. They have access to the admin side of the system and can often provide a folder with all your child's photos on request. Ask well before the last day.
A folder of 400 files is not yet an archive
Once you have that zip, you're not quite done. What sits on your computer is a folder of files named things like IMG_20240612_103455.jpg, with no order, no context, and sometimes the wrong date, because some portals set the file date to today when exporting.
In five years nobody will open that folder. That is usually how memories disappear: they become impossible to find.
What you want is for those photos to sit on their own date in your child's timeline, alongside the photos you took yourself. Then you can scroll through the whole year at once, instead of two separate versions of it.
Importing the export
In Ouderliefde you drag the zip file straight onto your child's import page. Here's what happens next:
- The unzipping happens in your browser. The zip file itself never goes to a server.
- The date taken comes from the photo itself. Every photo from a phone or camera carries the moment it was taken in its EXIF data. That takes priority over the file date, so a photo from June 2024 ends up in June 2024.
- Duplicate photos are skipped. If you import two periods that overlap, or accidentally import the same export twice, your library stays clean.
- They go into the photo library, not straight into the timeline. Spreading four hundred photos through your diary at once helps nobody. You decide which ones become a memory.
Make it a yearly habit
A regular moment works better than a rescue mission on the last day. Every June, at the end of the nursery or school year, block twenty minutes in your diary to make the export and import it. That way you never fall behind, and the end of the contract is just a formality.
The same habit works for school: reports, drawings and school photos disappear in exactly the same way.
Do it today, not next year
If your child still goes to nursery, you can sort this out tonight. If the contract has already ended, email the nursery; sometimes they still have the photos. Just don't count on it.
What you lose with a closed account are precisely the hours when you weren't there yourself.