What Do Passport Photos Have in Common With Lady Gaga’s Shoes?

What do your passport photos have in common with 10-inch floating platforms?

Eventually, at the worst possible moment, passport photos will turn on you, as sure as Lady Gaga’s Heathrow footwear .

If you ask an official in advance how many passport photos are needed, their answer will be exactly two less than the truth.
By the same token, if you are told you don’t need a passport photo, you will.
Your plans change: Herzoslovakia, here I come! Wait…they need passport photos, too?

I’m going to tell you what to do so that you’ll always have a passport photo when you need one. You can say goodbye to last-minute panics and enjoy your travels. Better yet, you can stop paying sums the size of Lady Gaga’s wardrobe for tiny pieces of shiny paper.

A cautionary tale of 6 unprepared trekkers

When my husband, his four parents and I were setting off on a trek into the Himalayas, we spent about eight solid hours sorting out passport photo woes over a two-day period.

The trek required two separate permits, one for trekking and the other for entrance into the Lower Mustang region. By the time we’d finished filling out the first permit application and had scrounged up the required passport photos, the office for the second application was closing and refused to process our paperwork. I coaxed them into a promise that they’d do ours first thing in the morning (which meant about 10:30 am).

The next morning, when we showed up expecting to get our permits, we were told that we should have submitted another set of passport photos with these applications. It is typical of Nepali bureaucracy that although I had spent 10 minutes talking to the administrative the previous day, she’d never mentioned this, nor was it written anywhere on the application form. Since the majority of the group didn’t have extra photos, that meant yet another taxi trip to get photos taken, wait around for them to be printed, and return to the agency.

Moral of the story? If everyone had been carrying a stash of extra photos, we would have had nary a moment’s pause. (Jumping through bureaucratic hoops is always awful, of course, but the passport photo thing is the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Kind of like those last few inches on Lady Gaga’s platforms.)

The silver lining was that passport photos are dirt cheap in Nepal–if we’d been in Australia, we would have paid over $350 in photographs for those two applications alone. In Nepal, we paid the equivalent of a few dollars.

The specifications for passport photographs are so strict that they have become an official standard of sorts. In your travels around the globe, you may need passport photos for the following:

Passport (if your original is stolen or lost)
Visa application
Trekking permit
Entrance permit
Check card
Identity card
Bank account application
High-security clearance

Always carry a stash of passport photos

50′s a good number. You probably won’t need them all immediately, but it’s not like they expire.

Some places do have a within-6-months stipulation, but honestly–unless you have a Michael Jackson makeover, how would they know when the photo was taken?

How much do passport photos cost?

In the words of a Jedi master, “The passport photo industry: you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.”

Strictly speaking, Obi Wan may have been referring to Mos Eisley Spaceport, but he could just as well have been referring to the hive of massive profit-margins that the passport photo industry has become. It seems that the more developed a country is, the more outrageous the sums people are expected to pay for passport photos.

In the USA, passport photo providers are surprisingly easy to find, despite the fact that many Americans are still unaware of the existence of other countries. You can get passport photos at Rite Aid, CVS, Costco, or Walgreens. These places are famous for cheap cameras and poor lighting. They will charge you between $5 and $10 for two photos. You can have photos taken at the post office, Kinkos, or UPS for about $10-$15. The price is higher but the quality’s about the same (although the Post Office has a better chance of at least meeting compliancy specifications.)

In the UK, passport photo providers are even easier to find than in the USA, but the cost is similar–usually around £4.00. You can get photos at Boots, Tesco, Kodak, Sainsburys, and local train stations. In Australia, passport photos cost $14.95 at the post office.

Other countries around the world with a similar standard of living charge similar prices. $10 or so may not seem that much to you, but if you want to stock up on photos, it’ll cost $250 for 50. There is no reason why the service providers need to charge such a huge overhead–it costs only a few cents for the paper and ink and the labor on their part is minimal.

Never pay sinful prices for photos again

Fortunately, advances in technology have brought professional-standard photography equipment into the home. You never need to pay these bloodsuckers another dollar, pound or yen. You can easily shoot, print and cut your own passport photos at home, even if you are a complete novice photographer.

ePassportPhoto.com makes the whole process extremely easy–and it’s free! I absolutely love this site. You select a country, upload your photo, and crop it. You can move the photo around so that your face is in the right spot. It then gives you a layout with several photos that you can print on your own paper.

If you don’t have a printer, just save the layout and have it printed elsewhere. It should cost only a few pennies (whatever you’d pay to print a normal photograph). Just don’t use Walgreens.

123PassportPhoto.com appears to offer an identical service. I’ve never used them so I don’t know how they compare.

What if you don’t have a digital camera?

If you don’t have a camera (or a camera-toting friend), there are two alternative methods to get a photo onto your computer for printing.

Scan an existing photo print.
Snap a photo with your webcam.

Enjoy peace of mind and live spontaneously

photo: emdot

Now that you have a stash of passport photos, stick some of them in your passport wallet and store the rest separately, just in case your passport gets stolen and you wish you had some photos. And off you go! With your stack of tiny mugshots, you are free to go where the wind blows you.