London Drugs Publishes What It Pays If the Photo Fails, But Not What It Costs

Something odd shows up when you read London Drugs’ passport photo page carefully: the only number on it is the one they pay you if things go wrong.

Their whole passport photo page runs to under 3,000 characters, checked on 2026-09-09, and searching it for dollar signs returns exactly one figure. Not a price. The guarantee.

What is published, and what is not

Published: a refund of your purchase, a free retake, and a $50 London Drugs gift card if your photo is declined. It covers passports, visas, permanent resident and citizenship photos, firearms licences, and all ages including babies. There is no appointment. A photo specialist takes it, hands you a quality checklist, and can issue a Biometric Passport/ID Check Print certificate showing the photo meets government criteria. They hold specifications for more than 100 governments.

Not published: what any of it costs. Not on the passport page, not on the visa photo page, not on the photography services page.

An earlier version of this page put their price at $16.99 to $19.99 CAD. That figure is not London Drugs’; it came from elsewhere and we could not confirm it, so it has been removed rather than restated with a hedge.

The three words that decide the guarantee

Read the guarantee wording twice and the condition surfaces. On their live service page it appears in both places as photos “declined for quality reasons.”

That is a condition about the cause of a rejection, not about proving one happened. The distinction is not academic, because it is the difference between two very different guarantees:

• If the passport office refuses your photo because the lighting, sizing or background was wrong, that reads squarely as a lab quality problem, and the guarantee is doing what it says.
• If it is refused because you wore glasses, because you smiled, or because the photo went to the wrong document type, the fault is not the lab’s. Whether that still counts is not defined anywhere, and London Drugs does not say.

Compare the same clause across the market and the shapes are genuinely different. Staples asks for documents rather than causes: your receipt plus a letter from the State Department, and the remedy is a retake, since their order page states the service is non-refundable. PhotoAiD asks for an authority-issued document too, then pays the bonus half only into PayPal or a Polish bank account. Our own policy accepts a screenshot but excludes rejections caused by user error, which is a cause condition of exactly the same family as this one.

So nobody here is unconditional, and the useful question is never “is there a guarantee” but “which gate am I behind.” A fuller comparison of what each service demands sets them side by side.

What to check for your own store

Since the price is not published, the answer for you is local:

• Phone the store you intend to visit and ask for the passport photo price before you drive. It takes under a minute and there is no online figure to check it against.
• Ask what “quality reasons” covers while you are on the phone. You are more likely to get a straight answer before a purchase than after a rejection.
• Ask for the quality checklist and the Biometric Check Print certificate. Both are offered and both are useful evidence later if anything goes wrong.

Doing it yourself

One Dollar Passport Photo costs $1. Upload a picture, the background is replaced and the frame is cropped to the Canadian 50×70mm specification, and you see the finished result watermarked before paying anything. It produces a print sheet plus the digital file. The Canadian passport photo page carries the current spec.

Being clear about the trade rather than talking past it: no version of that comes with $50 attached. Our guarantee refunds a dollar on proof of rejection within three business days, and excludes user error. If the value you place on a passport photo is mostly insurance against having to do it twice, London Drugs offers by far the most generous cover in this comparison, and paying an unpublished price for it is a defensible choice.

What you would be buying is a person, a calibrated setup, and a gift card if it fails. What you would be giving up is knowing the price in advance.