Online passport photos

Bruce Schneier finally impelled me to take care of a task on my to-do list: Get passports for everyone in my family. This is a supremely annoying ordeal in terms of paperwork; you need a certified copy of your birth certificate (which to obtain these days in California actually requires a notarized affidavit, thanks to identity thieves and teens making fake IDs) and a fair amount of information about your parents that you may have forgotten or never known.

But the part that used to require the most legwork -- getting two 2-inch square photographs of yourself -- has gotten quite a bit easier in recent years. Here's how to do it.

First, get a digital camera and have someone take your picture. Stand in front of a white wall during the day, and use a flash so it's very well-lit. Heck, while you're there, take 20 pictures so you can pick the one you like.

Second, import your favorite into Picasa. Warmify. Apply the "I'm feeling lucky" auto-correction. Remove red-eye if necessary. Erase blemishes. Save a copy of the resulting photo.

Third, upload the photo to ePassportPhoto and fiddle around with the cropping until you get something that matches the State Department requirements. The cropping tool has a silhouette that makes this pretty easy (though I wish you could drag the crop square after sizing it). When you're done you'll get a link to download a JPEG to your desktop. This picture will have six copies of your cropped portrait in a two-by-three matrix.

Fourth, upload into Snapfish. Order a 4x6 photo. Now, notice that you can have the photo printed at a local Walgreens, and that it will be ready in less than an hour! (Or have it mailed to your house if you're not in a hurry.)

Fifth, get out some scissors, and you're finished!

Now that I write it up, I see that perhaps this method is no easier than having the pictures taken at a place that does them for you. But you do get tremendous control over the final result; no more half-asleep portraits haunting you every time you travel for the next decade.

(Updated to swap steps 2 & 3)