OT: Passport photographs

[Andy Burns]

There's plenty of telltale artefacts left when files have been photoshopped, surprised the passport/dvla offices don't check for them.

[Colin Bignell]

My first passport had two photos of me. At the time they were issued for ten years, but had to be renewed after five. As I was a pre-teen when I got it, my appearance had changed enough at renewal to need a new photo of the teenage me. It always got a second look at passport control.

[SteveW]

Does a bit of variance matter though? You could leave the country pale, with a beard and long hair and return clean shaven, with a shaved head and heavily tanned. They can't expect you to keep changing passports as such things change.

[SteveW]

Driving licences and passports are the main ones. They'll happily access each other's databases to use the photo from one for renewal of the other, with no need to submit a new photo at all.

[The Natural Philosopher]

So speaks a man who cannot see.

Actually simply changing color balance , intensity, or luminance or gamma is undetectable.

[Rod Speed]

All wogs look the same.

[Pamela]

Ironically the Passport Office say not to use any image processing. There are clever technical ways to detect altered photos but they are probably not very reliable.

[Ian Jackson]

In message <XnsAF9EBDEC7F02D37B93@88.198.57.247>, Pamela [e-mail] writes

A couple of passport renewals ago (which happened to be an occasion when they decided they needed a new picture), I'm pretty sure that the instructions said "Digital photos not allowed". As I was sending a physical photo, I reckoned there was no way they could tell the difference between an 'old type' and digital - so I just used my digital camera, and printed it. No problems.

[Vir Campestris]

My wife just got hers done via the post office's digital check and send service

Went through first time, and TBH if we'd known it was going to be this quick we'd have delayed the application a bit.

Andy

[Roger Mills]

Many thanks to everyone who replied. In the end I decided to cut my losses and went to a professional photographer who did them for £12.50 each including generating a code and uploading them to the passport office server.

That way, I was able to get the online applications in on 1st Feb, prior to the next day's price increase from £75.50 to £82.50

I've always taken my own photos in the past - but they seem to have changed the rules since I last did it 10 years ago.