Authorized Photo Studio Finder for a Sri Lanka Passport

There is no arithmetic on this page, and it would be dishonest to dress a lookup up as a calculator. What there is: an exact copy of an official register, and a matching rule. The page is worth using only if both are what the Department publishes, so both are written out here.

Where the rows come from

The Department publishes its authorized studios at immigration.gov.lk/studio_e.php, one district at a time, in a table you cannot search across districts and cannot sort. The served HTML carries an empty table: the rows arrive over a background request keyed to a district id, and asking for "all districts" returns nothing at all. So the register was assembled district by district, all 25 of them, on 2026-10-19, when the Department's own page reported a last update of 2026-10-16. That returned 1,420 rows.

What had to be cleaned up

10 of those rows are exact repeats of another row in the same district, six of them the welfare association studio at 41 Ananda Rajakaruna Mawatha in Colombo 10. De-duplicating on the name, address and telephone together leaves 1,410 distinct studios, and the page reports both numbers rather than quietly publishing the smaller one. Telephone numbers needed more care: the register writes most of them without the trunk zero ( 112678955) and some with it, and 160 rows put two or three numbers in one cell separated by slashes. The zero goes back on only where the digits make a complete Sri Lankan number. Fourteen published numbers do not, one of them eight digits long, and those are printed as published without a dial link instead of being padded into something that looks real. One studio publishes no number at all, and says so.

The matching rule

The district filter applies first, then the studio name as a plain substring, then the town. The town is matched against the published address on whole words, not as a raw substring, because the register is written with no consistent punctuation: "NUGEGODA.", ",NUGEGODA" and "NUGEGODA SRI LANKA" all have to match the same query.

The one case that needs a real decision is a town query that is also a district. Search "Jaffna" and matching street addresses returns 14 studios, two of which sit on a Jaffna Road outside Jaffna district altogether, while 30 of the Department's Jaffna studios never write the word in their address. Either answer on its own is wrong. So a town query that names a district widens to that district, and the road-name matches are listed underneath, labelled, with their real district on each one. Nothing is silently dropped and nothing is silently counted in the wrong place.

What this page will not tell you

It will not tell you which studio is nearest. The register carries no coordinates, and geocoding 1,410 unverified address strings would put wrong pins on a government register, so there is no map. It carries no opening hours and no prices for private studios either, so none are shown. The Department's own counter hours live on the passport office finder, and the fees on the passport fee calculator.

How the page checks itself

Six rows were copied by hand off the register and kept separate from the generated table, chosen to pin every awkward shape in it: a number without its trunk zero, two numbers in one cell, the single studio in Mullaitivu, the row with no telephone, the eight-digit number, and the Jaffna Road address in Anuradhapura. On every render the page re-reads those six out of the live table and the badge in the tool header reports the result. The per-district counts are reconciled the same way: distinct rows plus known repeats have to equal what the Department returned, for all 25 districts, or the badge turns red.

These six rows were read off the Department's register by hand on 2026-10-19 and are re-compared against the live table on every render. Between them they pin every awkward shape in the source.

Source: Department of Immigration and Emigration, Authorized Photo Studios, https://www.immigration.gov.lk/studio_e.php. Read 2026-10-19.

• Department of Immigration and Emigration: Authorized Photo Studios register (all 1,410 studios, by district)
• Department of Immigration and Emigration: General Information on Passports (printed photos, the 6-month rule, the Studio Acknowledgement Note)
• Immigrants and Emigrants Act No. 20 of 1948 as amended by Act No. 7 of 2015 (biometric photograph and fingerprints)
• Department of Immigration and Emigration: official site

The register was read and counted on 2026-10-19; the Department's page reported its own last update as 2026-10-16. This page is not operated by, affiliated with or endorsed by the Department of Immigration and Emigration. It is a faster way to read what they publish. A studio that has closed, or a number that no longer answers? [email protected].