And it's a classic case of Not Invented Here as well: this problem was solved decades ago and the solution is widely-deployed in passports and most European identity documents - just use NFC!

Cryptographic NFC chips are basically free these days, and any modern smartphone can read them. The photo issue is solved by having the chip contain a copy of the photo, as a few extra kilobytes of data isn't an issue when you aren't using barcodes. The copy issue is solved by having the chip sign a verifier-provided nonce together with the data, and having the government sign the chip's public key instead.

Biometric passports, including US ones, have supported the same protocol for decades at this point.