How to preserve teacher captions when downloading from Seesaw

What happens to captions in the standard Seesaw export

The zip file is organised by month. Inside each folder: the original image and video files, plus an HTML file for each post. The HTML file holds the teacher's caption, the date, and any notes, but it's code, not plain text. To read a single caption you'd open its HTML file in a browser, one post at a time.

The captions are not embedded in the image files themselves. So if you drag the photos into Google Photos, iCloud, or a folder, the captions don't travel with them. They stay behind in the HTML.

This is what most parents don't find out until it's too late: the standard download gives you the captions, just not alongside the photos.

Why the captions are worth preserving

A photo of a drawing is a drawing. A photo of a drawing with the teacher's note about the day your kid first wrote their name is a memory.

Captions are also impossible to reconstruct after the fact. Once a Seesaw account is deleted, they're gone. Per Seesaw's own documentation, inactive student accounts move to an 18-month retention period before deletion. The photos might survive in a zip file you saved earlier. The words might not, unless you did something to keep them attached.

How to keep the captions attached to the photos

Three approaches, and only one keeps the captions readable next to the photos without hours of manual work:

For the full step-by-step and a side-by-side comparison of every option, see the best way to save Seesaw photos with captions. The short version: upload the zip, preview to confirm the captions are attached, pay $12.95 per journal, connect Google Photos, and your photos arrive with every caption embedded.

Common questions

Do Seesaw captions download with the photos?

They download in the same zip, but not attached to the photos. The captions sit in HTML files, separate from the image files. To get them onto the photos themselves, you need to embed them as metadata.

Are all teacher captions included in the Seesaw export?

Only captions on posts your child can see. A child's journal includes posts tagged with their name, plus posts tagged "Everyone" (class-wide work). A post tagged only to another student won't appear in your child's journal, so its caption won't either. This is the same tagging logic that determines what you see in the Seesaw app.

What if I already downloaded the zip, can I still preserve the captions?

Yes. Upload whichever zip you have to Little Archive. It reads the HTML files and matches each caption to its corresponding photo automatically.

Will the captions stay in Google Photos permanently?

Yes. Little Archive embeds captions as EXIF metadata, the same way photos store their date and location. The metadata travels with the photo file, so even if you download the photos from Google Photos later, the captions are embedded in the file.

Is this worth it if the class was only one year?

A single school year can run to several hundred posts. One caption per photo is a lot of context to lose. Whether that's worth $12.95 is a personal call, but the captions can't be recovered once the account is gone, so the decision has a deadline.