[lakkal]

That's interesting that your card made it to you with the wrong photo on it. There was a visual inspection process that compared what the printed card looked like, to what it's supposed to look like, and cards were supposed to be ejected and reprinted if there was a mismatch. I worked on the machine/system that prints those cards in the late 90s. When was your card issued? I heard somewhere (and find it easy to believe) that the entire system we built was replaced with something much smaller and simpler a few years later as technology improved.

[bckygldstn]

Interesting! This was ~2018.

My memory is a little hazy, but I remember having the photo taken at USCIS, walking over to a photo booth which asked to confirm some information like name or number and maybe a fingerprint too? Anyway, it wasn't a polaroid paperclipped to my forms: it seemed like a different system that would have to be linked to my application.

The images are very different: same gender, but different race, and off by about 30 years and 1 head of hair!

[lakkal]

Oh, long after the system I worked on was replaced. Back in 1997-1999 the images were filenames in a database record, and we just read the image file and printed it on the card. Then at a later stage a camera looked at the printed card and compared it to what it should look like. We also used to 'etch' the same photograph into the 'laser' (CD-like) golden strip on the back of the card. When you wrote data to the laser strip, it changed the appearance by darkening it. There was an API library supplied by the manufacturer of the encoder drives that could write a visible image to the strip. Not sure if the modern cards still have that feature.