To toggle on photo downloads from your News feed, head to your Settings in the bottom left corner and navigate to Communication. Click on News feed and find the Photo download section. By default, this feature is toggled off - so parents won't see the option to download any photos until it's switched on by a manger.

Once enabled, parents will see a download button on the photos they receive in the News feed or on their child's profile on their phone and can easily download them. Parents will see this option appear on both photos posted to the News feed, tagged photos on their profile, and those attached to assessments and observations.

Clicking on the download button triggers the following message to display:

If the parent clicks I understand, they will then be able to save the photo to their preferred location:

If turned off, parents cannot directly download photos via the Famly app, but will still be able to save photos in ways beyond Famly’s control e.g. via web browsers or screenshots.

Below is a collection of the most frequently asked questions around this feature

Can I turn this on and off?

It’s completely up to you to decide whether or not you want to allow parents to download photos from the app. It’s disabled by default, meaning that you actively need to turn this on in Settings if you want parents to have the feature. You can enable or disable this feature as many time as you want, anytime.

Where will parents see the download option?

On each single photo in their news feed for either posts or observations. They need to click on the individual photos to see the option. This means parents will only be able to download one photo at a time.

Does this allow photo download of other children?

Parents will be able to download any photo from their News feed that is shared with them. This means, they can potentially download photos containing children other than their own. However, the warning does explain that they should ask for permission to download the photo if children other than their own appear in it:

Remember that parents can still take screen shots of these photos or save images from web browsers, even if you don’t turn on the download feature, as this is outside Famly’s control.

I cannot see the toggle in Settings to turn on the feature

You need to have the permission to Manage enabling/disabling features to be able to see it in Settings.

Is this only available to parents?

Yes, if you turn on this feature, the download option will only be available for parents not staff.

I cannot see the option to download even though I turned on the feature

This could be due to 2 things:

What will the download button look like for parents on different devices?

If the feature is turned on, on each picture in the news feed, when opening up a single picture there will be a Share icon. This looks different on iOS and Android.

When a parent clicks on the Share icon, the general phone menu opens up like it does from other apps. Here, the parent can select the options that their respective device allows for.

The Share button on iPhone:

The Share button on Android:

I’m manage a group and want to disallow managers from turning this on for themselves. What do I do?

Please reach out to support@famly.co and we can hide the toggle from the Settings page.