Renewing US passport from the UK

Any tips or advice for this? Where to get US approved passport photos, best way to pay, any other experiences that might be useful? I have to do it by mail, don't have time to go in person. Ideally, I'd like to be able to do it all in one fell swoop--application, photos, payment, boom all together and sent off in an afternoon. Is this possible?

TIA!

You can get photos from the high street photo shop Max Spielmann.

For photos, I highly recommend paspic.com.  You take the photo yourself and they edit the background to suit and send it first class post.  Much cheaper than the high street places and more "control" over your photo than a booth at a grocery store.

The payment thing seems to be the tricky bit.   

For photos I can recommend http://www.epassportphoto.com/ - used them for a while now and always works great. They're free and let you download the combined image yourself to send off to wherever you want for printing.

Yeah, you could definitely get it done in an afternoon, but its the courier bit that will be the hang up.

For photos I just sucked it up and went to Snappy Snaps. Its a terrible photo but hey ho I needed to get it done quick and they were right over the bridge from work.

I would suggest booking the time first with the courier because if any point in the process is going to fail, its with those idiots. I think i had to make an appt for pick up by phone.

DONT FORGET TO INCLUDE YOUR OLD PASSPORT - I did and had to send another package so really doubled down on the courier pain last year. Search back a few pages to another thread about getting a passport and I think I may have included my tale of woe in there

I think we are so trained by the stupid amount of paperwork required on the UK side that you can forget that the US passport application is like what, two pages? You can totally bang this out quick.

We will be getting our photos from our local Sainsburys where they have a machine which includes an option for US Visa photos which are the same specifications for the US passport.

We plan on visiting my wife's sister in Edinburgh next month and doing an in-person application at the US Consulate.