Gordon Bennett… finally had a phonecall from DHL …
“are you home”… yes
a second call
“the road is blocked and I can’t get through”
… wherever you are, head for RN and try another D road, there are lots of roads in and out and traffic is moving.
Finally a third call…
“I’m at the Mairie, where are you?”
So I wandered a few feet up the road, waved frantically… and the dear man drove over to my place
Phew, the icing on the comical cake was when his brakes failed to hold… (my road is on a slight slope…)
He had to turn sideways and park with the bonnet on the pavement to stop the van moving gently forward while he got out …
Anyway… Passport with ghastly photo safely signed and tucked away in the Travel Bag…
Sent to UK 14/11 and got the new one back today 1/12… that’s amazing service
Now, all we need is for OH’s Passport to emerge from the Bermuda Triangle and arrive at Hemel Hempstead… please…
I did once have them saying it wasn’t me
7 of us rock up to Dover going to the 24 hours in Le Mans around 23.00 all in Cannon Ball film outfits , I hand over the 7 passports to the border guy, cue windows going down doors getting opened and he gets to the last one which was me the driver, this looks nothing like you he says, well I have had the passport for 8 years and I don’t think I have changed much apart from getting greyer, cue puzzled look and he shows me a passport with a guy with ginger hair.
At this point I told him that’s not me but the one underneath is, there was an “O shit moment” as he realised it was the passport from someone in the minibus before us, cue much talking and swearing on the radio
This morning LaPoste reported to me that OH’s Passport had “cleared Customs on 1st December”
(Which was something which my own Passport package never appeared to go through… but what the heck… just hoping it was UK Customs and not Rwanda or elsewhere )
and now, LaPoste tells me that OH’s Passport "has been delivered to blah blah, today 4th December… Hurrah !
I’m in the midst of renewing my UK passport. I did the application online, & sent off the passport, which at least has safely arrived at the Passport Office, Hemel Hempstead. During the online process, the system cleared my (mobile camera’s) photo, describing it as ‘good’. I was therefore puzzled to receive today the following:-
“The photo you submitted with your passport application can’t be used. It doesn’t meet the photo standards set by the International Civil Aviation Organisation”. The PO website now says that the (previously cleared) photo is either too dark or has shadows. It would be nice if it had said that during the initial online process. The website helpfully says I need to find some sunlight…
I did my wife’s passport application a couple of weeks ago, when I uploaded the photo it said it was medium quality but acceptable. New passport received today. I cant remember where the old passport sent, but it definitely wasn’t Hemel Hempstead
Incidentally… it’s worth remembering that for those of us Residents holding the CdS (Withdrawal Agreement)… we don’t need any extra months on our passport when going to Schengen Countries (including France… ), the expiry date is just that and we can travel until that very day…
Very interesting to hear people’s experiences, especially your husband Stella, as my passport renewal seems to be in limbo in the postal system.
I applied online from France on 31st Jan and posted my old passport to Corby the same afternoon with tracking.
Apart from confirming receipt no updates from La Poste until 7th Feb when it ‘had been sorted and was ready to leave France’
8 days later and no news from La Poste, Royal Mail or the passport office.
I know it’s only 2 weeks and apparently there are some postal strikes in France at the moment so I’m hoping it’s just got caught up in that.
I’m kicking myself because I now wish I’d paid the extra and gone for a same day appointment at the passport office when I was in England in January. I expected it might take a while but not knowing whether my old passport is lost for ever or maybe stolen is worrying.
I’m going to wait until early next week and then contact La Poste.
If anyone has had a similar experience or had to contact La Poste about an item it would be interesting to hear how you got on.
Best way to do a DIY passport photo is to use very boring and even lighting!
Easiest is outdoors on an overcast day - that minimises shadows and gives you enough light to avoid a grainy picture. On a sunny day the lighting may be too harsh.
If you have to do it indoors don’t stand under an overhead light source, which will produce shadows, and use a flash if possible.
I had an identical situation (albeit with a tax return, not passport). La Poste said the registered letter had been collected, then silence. Nothing more from them. Nothing registering on the Royal Mail site. After 3 weeks I clicked on the ‘where on earth is my letter’ button on La Poste’s tracking site. It fired question after question at me (where and when did I send it from, how much did it weigh, how much did i spend on postage etc). Then after a few days I got a message to say effectively the letter was missing, presumed lost with all hands.
I then received an automatic refund of all the postage costs. And finally - of course - a receipt from HMRC to say the return had been received… despite radio silence from both La Poste and the Royal Mail.
I think posting on here has un-jinxed it because another check on the la poste suivi says it has arrived in England. I feel much better knowing it’s making progress, however slow.
As mentioned above by Mark I should also get an email when it gets to the passport office.
Bear in mind there can sometimes be quite a time lag between a passport reaching the Passport Office and them both updating the tracking, and emailing you. My passport reached them on 7 Feb, but they only acknowledged it a week later. In fairness to them, they do state this possibility on the tracking site. Good luck with your own application.
Great advice and the photo has finally been accepted. Thanks.
21 years a professional photographer man and boy so I’ve had some practice - though I don’t do passport photos as there’s no money in it unless you have premises.
I did do a set of photos for a family a few years ago who needed images of a specific size for their Saudi Arabian visa application. But these days everyone can do a passport shot reasonably well on their phones.
My previous partner asked me to smooth out her crows’ feet in Photoshop for her minute driving licence photo! Naturally I obliged, but also split the image in two, then copied, flipped and pasted one half to make a perfectly symmetrical face that instantly looked uncanny - today it would probably be assumed to be AI generated.
We have very powerful, genetically relayed, intuitive feature filters, and perfect facial symmetry in nature is very rare - my research in that area revealed that Raphael’s Virgins are characterised by an unnaturally high degree of facial symmetry - intuitively created perfection…
Yes I think this is one reason why a lot of AI-generated images look wrong.
That and having six fingers of course.
As a professional photographer I am ambivalent about AI - on the one had I use it myself to remove unwanted distractions from backgrounds, open people’s eyes in Photoshop, etc. - but I am not so keen on images being totally AI-generated - they make it hard to tell fact from fiction, and most of them are based on real images lifted from photographers’ websites without their consent or any compensation.
Several thousand of my images have been pulled into the photo database used by such programs as Midjourney, for example. The only firm that seems to be doing this the right way is Adobe, which paid me about $40 this year for the rights to use my stock images in Adobe Firefly.
If you’ve got Photoshop or similar and a few spare minutes - it may be amusing to bisect a head-on passport style portrait, then copy, flip and paste each half to create two wholly symmetrical, but surprisingly different faces.
I have commented to the Passport Office that they should think about why their system initially can accept a photo, then later reject it. Also they should consider including guidance on how to resize a photo. I got a dialogue box that said the photo file was too large but had no idea whatsoever how to go about reducing it. Luckily my keen photographer wife knew what it was all about.
Overall though I’m very impressed with the user friendly nature of the passport renewal process, far better than I feared it might be, and consistent with the positive comments seen earlier on this thread from others.
An update: my passport has been delivered to Corby, only one day after being logged as arriving in UK.
I’ll never know if the delay was in it leaving France or in being logged as arriving in England. I’m just really happy it wasn’t lost/stolen in transit.
My entire passport renewal , from online application, to delivery yesterday here in Seine Maritime, took only 20 days. This includes 3 days of delays from rejecting my various attempts at photos. I’m very impressed and would certainly recommend this to anyone else living in France and worried about how long they’d be without a passport during the renewal process.
, I hand over the 7 passports to the border guy, cue windows going down doors getting opened and he gets to the last one which was me the driver, this looks nothing like you he says, well I have had the passport for 8 years and I don’t think I have changed much apart from getting greyer, cue puzzled look and he shows me a passport with a guy with ginger hair.
