Spending a relaxing day at home watching updates as my wife makes her way through the enormous line at the passport office.
note to self:
and to others too:
add a "My Passport Expires Today" event in your calendar NOW, for 2027 or whenever it is, with an eight-months-ahead alert. remember that when you travel, your passport usually needs to be valid for an additional six months.
(Also add a comment to the calendar item saying "Hey, Steve says hello from the year 2022.")
I'm sure she's fine, she'll be coming home with wonderful tales of the terrific people she met in the 8 hour passport office line.
will she be coming home with a new passport? Of course not! That's not how it works! Sheesh.
Breaking News! Don't assume that a so-called professional Passport Photographer knows how to take a valid passport photo, something she only found out after five hours in line.
fortunately there's another photographer in the mall where the passport office is.
i bet THEY know how to do it
A skeptic - not me - might wonder if the photographer in the mall where the passport office is happens to have some arrangement with the people in the passport office who decide whether your photo is valid.
No, that would never happen.
The bank lets me deposit cheques through its app by taking a photo of the front and back, and then (I think) some human being looks at the photo to decide if it's OK or if you need to retake it.
Perhaps "Service" Canada could have some similar operation where you an upload a passport photo and they say "Yeah, that's fine, come on in and get in line" or "No, you need to go back to the photographer <cough> staples <cough> for a re-do."
@Shayman I made something to that effect actually for the US spec. Very crude but the idea was it superimposes the minimum and maximum heights for various features (chin, eyes, top of head) and you pan/zoom until everything's between the lines, then it crops and positions it so it fits the standard 4"-by-6" size and you can cut it out (which sell for 35c as opposed to 15 or 20 USD to order the 2"-by-2" size required by the passport office).
Obviously it can't check if you're wearing glasses or making a funny face or anything, but with a bit of human judgement it makes it possible to verify there isn't a formatting error that would invalidate it.
The issue for Canadian requirements is that the photos have to be taken by a photographer who signs and dates them, so you'd need to go once, have your photo taken and get a digital copy, verify it, and then go back to have him print, sign, and date the physical version.
@khird interesting, thanks! issue here seems to have been that the Canadian photographer took something (and signed/dated it) that they should have realized was out of spec before someone had to spend 5 hours in line to learn this. We will be paying the photographer a cordial visit.