20 Photos

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20 Photos takes your hundreds of photos and whittles them down to 20. I’m Jo of Jo Tennant Photographs. I am passionate about memories and how we record them.

Award-winning photographer, Jo Tennant, edits and prints these 20 to make your story into art that you’re proud to have on your walls. We’ve all got a great camera in our pocket and capture the moments that make up our lives. But then what? They sit there, the digital equivalent of shoeboxes under your bed, overwhelming in their number. It seems like our memories will be lost with the endless march of digital. I have the skill to curate your photos into a story that is beautiful and meaningful and printed - the medium that lasts forever. This is what 20 Photos is about. I’m an award-winning photographer - I taught myself to photograph because I wanted to capture what it felt like to be somewhere and always be able to bring that back… I’ve continued to learn, challenge and experiment. 20 Photos has come out of that. I live in Edinburgh and love my family and home by the sea.

28/10/2026

the order you do this in will save you HOURS.

The biggest bear trap is opening the photobook software first 🕳️ 😱

80% of people who start photo books never complete them... maybe there is solace in that? But also, save this reel and it’ll mean you can be part of the magical 20% with photo book superpowers.

24/10/2026

The advice I’d give you for a milestone birthday photo book is NOT to start with the photos.
(Perversely never start with the photos!)

Not with the spreadsheet either. (That’s part of the process)

Start with the story and bend the rules to fit your needs. Create ‘moments’ rather than photos.

22/10/2026

Photos somehow turned from a thing of joy to an admin ‘gotta sort these’ task in our mental models.   I don’t think that in order to enjoy them you have to have Photo Inbox Zero or even aim for it.   I’m much more interested in than whether your camera roll is organised:
Can you pull out the photos of one person you love from a moment in time?
Can you find the ones that tell the story of a particular summer? Not all of them - the ones that tell a story.
Can you enjoy from the random but good photos that currently live in your camera roll hinterland?  
That, to me, is a much more useful measure of whether your photos are working for you.

21/10/2026

Something I think about OFTEN when I’m curating photos:

We are TERRIBLE at filtering out the boring little details are going to become interesting later.
It’s the stuff that is your current visual clutter. In a decade (or more) they’re a time machine back to this moment.

If you’re the Chief Memory Officer of your family, I think “timeless” is overrated when the whole point of a photograph is to remember a TIME.

Now tell me, do you want to play Curators Dilemma again?

09/10/2026

Who do you want to show this collection to? What would they need to see to understand why it mattered?

That can help you choose between several photos you love.

24/09/2026

People I love and respect have celebrated this viral reel on how to save yourself iCloud storage bills.  (TBF they aren’t in the photography world - they’re moms who are trying to figure out this photo overwhelm we’re all stressed out by).   Think about when you actually go looking for a memory. Is it going to be on a hard drive in a drawer?  
Make your own mind up but do question the internet hack that sounds too good to be true.  the choppy editing isn’t my finest - I had a lot to say that didn’t fit into Instagram’s short form!

23/09/2026

This photo is a bit of a superstar in my family memories. Other photos appear in just one collection.
Others appear in none (those are the ones you can delete).

If you start with this way of building your memories - of finding the photos that are building blocks rather than trying to delete the rubbish, I promise it makes your life SO much easier - and more fun - than trying to find this imaginary one-selection-fits-all.

And if you want to try doing this with 20 Photos, comment BETA and I’ll add you to the waitlist.

22/09/2026

One thing I didn’t explain above is why I landed on 20.
20 Photos.
As a photographer, I was taught that a portfolio should contain no more than 20 images. Most photo stories need fewer. After that you get repetition and overwhelm.  
If 20 photographs cannot tell the story, I don’t add another wodge of photos. I ask a different question.

19/09/2026

A year feels short when you only ever see it one photo or a mass of photos at a time.

when you lay it out as 12 months - you can see the nuance of the months in one go and I can testify ALWAYS a lot more happened than you remembered.

16/09/2026

The language around our photo libraries / camera rolls is unreal - they store our happiest, most fundamental memories - both massive life events and the smaller everyday moments that tell stories of their own - and yet we talk about them being overwhelmingly stressful.

Address

Edinburgh

Website

http://20.photos/

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