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Liky many engineers, one of my pet peeves in life is watching someone do something inefficiently. So when I saw my wife spending multiple hours downloading pictures from our son’s daycare, I knew I had to do something about it. As many parent-users of Brightwheel probably know by now, if your school posts any media of your child[ren], there is no way to download it in bulk. Instead, the only (and officially recommended approach ), is to right click on each image/video and download them individually.

At this time photos must be downloaded individually, not in batches.

With 5-10 pictures/videos of each kid per day, that is a LOT of (manual) right clicking!

A few months after building a simple script for my wife, two different friends mentioned they were were doing the same repetitive workaround and I knew it was time to take the sawdust on my computer and share it with the world.

After a bit of hacking, voila, there is now a chrome extension that will let any user of Brightwheel download their media in bulk with just a single click.

How to use: Link to heading

  1. Install the chrome extension from the Chrome Web Store

  2. Login to your Brightwheel account

  3. Right click anywhere on the Brighwheel website and click on the menu item titled “Bulk download media”.

  4. This should open a new tab with a very simple form. Select the child (if you have more than one) and the start/end date.

  5. You may also optionally enter comma delimited keywords to exclude from the download. If any of these words are present in the description/note of the image in brightwheel, it will be excluded (e.g, my son’s daycare posts a few pictures each morning of the classroom setup and always has “Today’s provocations” in the description. I rarely want to see those so I would enter “provocations” in that field)

  6. Press Next. You should now see the number of images that were found in the selected time range.

  7. Press Download and you should see all your media downloading. Once they are all complete, you should have a zip file in your default downloads folder containing all the images and videos