Visa Photos -- DIY?

Has anyone applied for a visa by submitting photos you took yourself? They seem to emphasize needing professionally taken pics, but I was just wondering if anyone had had any luck with pics you took and printed yourself, provided they conform to the stated specifications...

We did ours ourselves, but this was back in 2005.

Why risk the DIY photos and just get the ones from Walgreens (they can be standard US passport photos) for $7.99 and be assured they're OK: http://www.walgreens.com/dmi/passport/default.html.

I have a friend whose husband did visa photos for both her visas, her British naturalisation application and her passport application - she was naturalised earlier this year - no problem with doing it themselves.

I personally don't have the patience for it, I just know I'd manage to end up cutting crooked somewhere along the way...

I don't know anything about printing out photos one's made oneself, so maybe this isn't a problem, but I'd be concerned with whether the resolution/printing was good enough.

The picture in my visa is a scan, and when I applied for my new (US) passport and queried the photo dimensions (which varied between two sets of information) they mentioned that they had to be scanned.

If self-printed photos are the same quality as professional ones then maybe it would be fine, but I'd say you're safest with professional ones.

According to the new Photographic Guidance published April 2009 the photos must be:

*printed professionally or taken in a passport photo booth. Photos printed at home are unlikely to be of an acceptable standard.

For your visa application, you can just use photos from anywhere that does US passport photos.  Some of these places will actually create them into UK sized photos if that's what you want (but you don't need to- US photos are fine)

As an aside, I did DIY photos on photoshop for my US passport renewal to send to the US consulate in Edinburgh - it was easy peasy following directions I found on the web and I had no issues whatsoever. 

Thanks all -- and where do the photos actually end up? If the visa is basically a stamp in a passport, does the passport gain a second photo inside it?

Yes.  Mine now has three. 

The visa is not a stamp -  the visa is a large sticker that takes up an entire page. It has your photo printed on it along with the other information re: your visa.

I used http://www.epassportphoto.com. It creates a 4x6 that you can either print yourself or have it printed somewhere like CVS.

Just go to Walgreens -- why not? They're cheap, they're on the spot, and they're on every damn corner. I did my UK passport-renewal pics there.

The Walgreens by me had computer program that was set up for both US and UK sized pics.  So they took the pic and then just followed to  screen by screen prompts so that even a 16 year old employee could not mess them up.  It was also, to me, very comforting to see exacting that our heads fit in between the biggest and smallest circles.   I would also point out that often either online or in their fliers Walgreens has coupons and for us it was only $4.99.

That same pic we sent in is used in this large sticker that goes into our passports and makes up our visa.  It appears they scan the image you send on to the sticker so it has to be able to fit into the spot they have for the pic on the visa.

http://www.walgreens.com/dmi/passport/default.html

Just go to Walgreens -- why not? They're cheap, they're on the spot, and they're on every damn corner. I did my UK passport-renewal pics there.

Just an FYI to the OP, we went to Walgreens to get my husband's photos for his green card a few eyars ago and they were wrong.

We also went to Walgreens to get my 5 yr old sons passport photos, and they were wrong. We had to get them redone.

I think it depends largely on the operator, ours clearly had no clue what they were doing. But from now we avoid them for passport type photos. I know bajillions of people have had good experiences with them, but we didn't. Just an FYI, for consideration.