Why You’re Overwhelmed by Your Photos - and What We Forgot to Carry Over from the Newsroom

Walk into a newsroom in the 1980s and you’d find two very different people working on the same photo story.

One was the photographer - fresh back from an assignment, film rolls straight into being developed.

The other was the photo editor, hunched over contact sheets and lightboxes, red wax pencil in hand. Their job wasn’t to take the photos. It was to find the ones that mattered.

The photo editor was trained to sift through hundreds, sometimes thousands, of images to build a visual narrative - not just any narrative, but one aligned with the story being told. Sometimes that came from the journalist’s piece. Sometimes it came from the publication's angle. But always, the photo editor was working within a clear context.

Their job was to understand the story, then find the right images to tell it.
Not the sharpest or most technically perfect — the most true.

This wasn’t a hobbyist’s job. It existed only in places where image overwhelm was a professional reality - newspapers, magazines, wire services, museums, archives. Places where someone needed to make sense of too much.

Now, suddenly, that’s where we all find ourselves.

Most people take hundreds of photos a month - because their phones are always with them.
Because kids grow up quickly. Because pets do something funny. Because beautiful, funny moments happen when you least expect them.

Because we want to remember.

Because it’s easy to take the photo - and harder to decide what to do with it.

And there’s the disconnect: we’re now living with the same kind of visual overload once reserved for editorial departments, but without the tools or training to manage it.

Photos from one day in July…

There’s no contact sheet.
No wax pencil.
No editor.

You’re the photographer and the editor and the storyteller whether you want to be or not.

That’s the real gap. The photos aren’t the problem. The missing role is.

At 20 Photos, we don’t just make prints. We step into that lost role. We act as your personal photo editor - not for a news piece, but for your own life story.

You tell us the shape of the chapter - a year, a trip, a moment - and we build the story from the hundreds of images you already have. We choose the 20 that say the most - not because they’re the most perfect, but because they’re the most right.

You are the photographer and the journalist.
We are the photo editor.

Because when someone helps you see what’s there, you finally stop scrolling - and start remembering.

And in that moment, the story becomes yours again.