Passport Photos
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Archived Q&A and Reviews
Cheap passport photos?
Jan 2004
Anyone know where we can get passport photos done cheaply? We live in Berkeley. Pauline
If you have a digital camera, you can do your own passport photos through Ofoto. We've made our own, and it was very easy and cheap. Carol
We had our photos taken at Costco for $5-6, I think. Even cheaper- find someone with a digital camera to take your picture, and you can crop and size it and have it printed at a photo store or do-it-yourself kiosk. Jim
Costco has cheap passport pix available at the one-hour photo counter. There's also a place in downtown Berkeley. anon
I've always used EastBay Photo and found them both inexpensive and experienced. It's a little place on Shattuck, in the island where Shattuck divides in two, in between Addison and University (or is it Center and Addison?). Anyway, small place, but nice people. They also keep negatives on file so you can go back and year or two later and get more copies if you need them for visas or whatever. Dianna
If you are willing to make the trek to San Leandro, Costco offers the cheapest passport photos we've seen (I'm afraid I can't remember the exact dollar amount though). Got my passport
Walgreens. Patty
The two best options for cheap passort photos are 1. Take them yourself with a digital camera. You only need a neutral background, so stand against a plain wall, size them appropriately on your computer, and you can take as many as you like. Worked like a charm when it was time for my husband to renew his passport.
2. Go to the photo shop on Solano, just above Colusa Ave (Ritz camera?). They will take the photo digitally for a resonable cost. We did this for my daughter when she was 1 year old. Easy going on Rose @ Cedar took her photo 4 times and it was still fuzzy. Sarbers on Solano tried to take her photo and out of a ton of smiles they caught her when she looked like she had just sneezed - again the focus was not good. At the photo shop on Solano just above Colusa the took 6 or 8 photos of her - we got to pick the best photo and they charged us for the ''sitting'' that comes with two photos (since they only actually printed two copies and could just erase the others). I think it was $15 or $18 - Well worth getting a good photo Lois
If you or a friend has a membership, passport photos are $4.99 at Costco. They take a digital photo, so the photographer was nice enough to let me look at it before it was printed and ask if it was ok.
They weren't able to take pictures of my 1 year old son who isn't able to stand up and not squiggle, so we took our own. You can find the exact measurements on the web. I believe it is 2''x2'' with the face between 1 and 1 3/8''. The background has to be white or off-white. If you can get the proportions rights, you can just trim any recent photo. In our case, I happened to have the Kinko's passport photo template from my last photo, so I scanned it in and adjusted the size of a digital photo that someone had taken. Anita
Passport photos that are inexpensive AND well done can be taken at Easy Going travel store at Rose Street and Shattuck in Berkeley. The ones I had done there recently were much better than those I got elsewhere. Easy Going also has many travel- related items like luggage, packs, travel clothing and books. This really great store also has travel slide shows and book presentations from time to time. Christine V
Try Costco-it's only about $5 for two color photos, done while you wait. anon
I had to take photos for a Japanese student visa and the requirements were also very fussy. What I found was a photo app so that I could take them with my phone. It had lots and lots of different specific options for different passports, visas, licenses etc from a wide variety of countries and was extremely easy to use.
I needed photos for a Japanese student visa and found an app for my phone that was specifically for the purpose of taking passport, visa, license photos. It had preset options for lots of different countries and documents and was quite easy to use. Then I took my phone to Walgreens and got the photos printed out. No problem!
Montclair 1-Hour Photo will do it. They're very familiar with the requirements for Canada.
Montclair photo has been good for us for non-US passport pictures, they have the chart with specs for each country and are thoughtful in implementing them correctly.
I used an online service for photos for a Chinese visa, using a digital photo we took at home against a plain white wall. I think it was this site, https://visafoto.com/, but any service that is set up to meet the varying requirements of visa photos should fit the bill.
I believe Express Photo on E18th in Oakland does international passports.