It arrives every July without fail. Your child walks out of school on the last day carrying a tower of paper, craft projects, and exercise books that could reasonably be classified as a structural hazard. There's the landscape painting from autumn term that you've never seen before. There's the collage you recognised from their class display photo back in March. There's a clay hedgehog that didn't quite survive the ride home. You have approximately three days of goodwill and dining-room space before the situation becomes an emergency.
VaultIt is the perfect tool for the end-of-year clearance sprint. Open the app, scan the entire pile in one session — a full school year typically takes around 20 minutes — and the AI automatically sorts everything by age, type, and approximate school term. Once scanned, each piece lives permanently in your private vault in the timeline view. The physical pile can go; every memory, every detail, every date stays.
Don't let the end-of-year pile sit. The first week of the summer holidays is the right moment — your child is still connected to what they made and can tell you about each piece. Two hours is usually enough to scan a full school year's worth of work.
Before you start scanning, let your child walk you through everything and narrate each piece — record this as a voice memo. The casual explanations they give, including the indifferent ones, are the context that brings the archive to life in a way no caption ever could.
Loose artwork scans flat and quickly. Illustrated exercise books need to be photographed page by page, which takes longer. Do the loose art first to build momentum and visible progress, then work through the books as a second phase.
For children with strong attachment to specific pieces, let them choose one physical original to keep from the whole year. Everything else is scanned and released. Giving them the choice makes the process feel participatory rather than something done to their work without their input.
My child's school sends home everything at the end of each year and I have years of backlog now — how do I approach it?
Tackle it one school year at a time, starting with the most recent. A single year's worth of art typically takes one to two hours to scan in a focused session. Work backwards year by year on separate occasions rather than trying to do everything at once — each completed year makes the backlog smaller and gives you a finished archive to look at.
There are obviously broken or damaged pieces in the pile — is it still worth scanning them?
Scan the damaged pieces before anything else — they're at highest risk of further deterioration during handling. A crumpled, torn, or paint-chipped piece scans perfectly well and its physical condition is part of its history. Don't let imperfect condition be a reason to skip a piece.
My child's school sends end-of-year photos of all the classroom art on display — can I use those instead?
Class display photos are worth keeping as supplementary context but they don't replace individual scans. Display photos capture scale and setting but not the detail of individual pieces. Keep both — the display photo as context, the individual scan as the primary record.
“Every year I swore I'd deal with the pile immediately and every year it ended up in a bin bag under the stairs. Last year we sat together on the first day of the holidays and scanned everything. The table was clear by lunchtime.”
— Mark, dad of two
Start preserving memories today
Tackle the School Year Pile FreeFree to download • No ads • Private