Magic Photo

Passport services available here for every country available, along with print and wedding shoot: portrait studio sessions. Super friendly and approachable down-​to-​earth staff. Great find!
Got my Canadian renewal shots here, these guys are experts at all the necessary requirements and do multiple Cdn shots daily.

Scanned my old photos for a family tree project; very friendly and helpful; I would definitely use them again.

I don’t really have a scale for how to rate passport photo places – do I factor in ambiance? I think not. I’m going to rate on efficiency and pleasantness and for that, Magic easily merits the full five star treatment.
It’s kind of tucked away in some strip malls that almost seem not to be there. You’re going so fast on this stretch of 99 that you can easily miss the sign because the letters just aren’t large enough to read at that speed. So pay attention. No vegging!
Once inside, though, they’re clearly well-​established, and they want to put a good foot forward. They handle all kinds of portraiture, frames, scanning, etc. But I was here to get a passport photo. How old am I and I have never needed one before? I know – ridiculous. But no time like the present, eh what.
Evidently there’s a whole science of regulatory observation to these things. I am glad I didn’t send off my $ 110 cashier’s check with a self-​portrait. You can’t smile. You need the right background. You need your head to be centered, and between this big and that big. Magic just takes what appears to be a candid snapshot with a little hand-​held digital, but then they weave their magic in special passport-​photo-​editing software that checks for all the stuff that the Department of State will reject you for. I am not making this up, and this was all news to me.
I walked in kind of expecting/​dreading the possibility that a passport photo place would be pretty grotty, with a decided air of helping kids get fake IDs. Clearly they’re not all like that. The lady was ultra-​pleasant, and knew all the regs for every country’s passports. She said she had customers come all the way to Edmonds from the east side because she could meet Brazilian photo requirements and no other studio in town could. This is crazy to me.
Ultimately, I paid $ 13 for two unflattering wallet-​sized mug shots, but I’m considering $ 12 of that at least to go for the expertise here. We’ll see in 4 – 6 weeks whether it was money well spent.