Consumer aesthetic preference. Enabling a revenue stream for small business. Reducing burden on already-overloaded passport office. Enabling remote applications for passports, e.g. there is not a passport office in every city of a large country.
The funny thing is, the local zoo had no problem taking your picture and printing it onto a all-year ticket 15 years ago, but I found it quite annoying that you are required to bring your own photo when applying for a new passport.
As I went through renewing my passport some weeks ago, having your picture taken with a webcam in the office would ad no complication to the process - any aesthetic value is lost by the time it is on the passport anyway.
And yet, the local zoo took the picture themselves in a process under their control, while the passport office doesn’t, but accepts pictures from external sources. That’s the point.
Professional photographers don't have a significant fraction of their business coming from zoo photos. They do for passport photos. They therefore complained about losing the latter business but not the former.
Nope. I know people who would have had to drive two or three hours to a USPS location that could do passport photos. And then, it's only done for a couple of hours a day, one or two days a week.
Instead, they went to the photo department of the pharmacy 15 minutes away and got it done.
USPS taking the role on primarily would likely entail expansion of the services to smaller post offices, like the one in my wife's old town of 400 people in the middle of nowhere.
