20 Photos

20 Photos 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 marc

h 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.

03/09/2026

“I really need to sort my photos” is something I hear all the time.

The problem is, most of us haven’t decided what “sorted” is meant to look like.

I have LOTS of thoughts on this. Follow for more.

31/08/2026

Comment BETA if you’d like to be on the waitlist.

The irony of making this reel is that I repeatedly couldn’t download my own photos from iCloud to make the slideshow in the middle.

24/08/2026

We now each make nearly as many photos as a magazine photo desk used to. Except there was a picture editor whose job was to decide what actually told the story.

Chief Memory Officers are doing both jobs.

Just don’t be the guy who tells the same story on repeat.

19/08/2026

This is a pretty geeky one TBH. But the Emory research blows my mind … and justifies why our family photos are not just pretty pictures but really super important when used in the right way…

17/08/2026

A saccharine photo reel of our perfect family life can feel a bit like eating a whole bag of Haribo in one sitting… using this framework for balance means we get some texture in there meaning photos are useful in years to come.

10/08/2026

A specific photo that takes you straight back is often incredibly hard to search for. Maybe the moment happened in a bar - how do you search for that if it was more than a month ago and not on a noteworthy date?
Maybe the person you remember most wasn’t looking at the camera so face search misses them. Maybe there’s nothing visually distinctive enough for AI to know why that photo matters.

This is where we’re silently losing access to a lot of our own memories. Painful thought, huh? Our photos aren’t gone but we’re expecting one unwieldy camera roll to do far too much.

Apple’s Memories give us an endorphin kick of an unexpected moment. Search can find *some* objects and faces. Neither really gives you the coherent stories of your life unless there’s some human context and thought involved.

Smaller collections are human sized. Not endless sorting. Just enough structure that the moments you actually care about don’t get buried.

06/08/2026

It is about a misalignment of incentives.

Apple Photos and Google Photos are very good at the job they were built to do: keep every image, keep you inside their ecosystem and make storage increasingly valuable.

They are not failing at curation. Curation is directly counter to their business model.

03/08/2026

We spend years taking far too many photos of our kids… and the bittersweet bit is that this is exactly the age you most want to remember and exactly when they may least want recording…

31/07/2026

DM me if you are a) your family CMO* AND b) would like to be an early user who can give me feedback. Direct to me, warts and all.

I don’t have automated DMs - so it’ll be me (a human) who replies to you and confirms what I need. It might take me a few hours. But I’d love to have you- just ping me a note.

*Not sure what a Family CMO is?

In every couple or family, there’s one person who takes most of the photos and sees them as important. Nobody gave them the job, but everyone knows it’s theirs.

That’s the Chief Memory Officer. (It won’t surprise you that I am 💯 mine in my family)

27/07/2026

This took me too long to realise. I hope it saves you a few years.

Put your phone down. Shorten the distance between you and them.

Further reading: Four Thousand Weeks - a life-changing book and a deeply inconvenient reminder that we do not, in fact, have unlimited time with the people we love.

And if you’ve been feeling guilty that you didn’t capture every moment beautifully, consider this permission to stop.

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