Legalising a Passport Copy from Edinburgh
Every other paper in a legalisation file was issued by somebody: a registrar, a university, a court. A passport copy is not. It is made from a document you already hold, and it becomes usable only once a signature is added certifying that the copy matches the passport. That signature is what the rest of the chain then stands behind.
People who want to legalize a Passport Copy in Edinburgh often assume there is a local government counter for it. There is not. The British stage runs by post out of Milton Keynes, and the consular stage, where a destination asks for one, is handled through that country's embassy or consulate rather than through anything in the city.
What belongs on the sheet
The copy has to be readable in full: the photo, the lines of code at the foot of the page, the number, the dates, all inside the border with nothing trimmed away. Sheets are turned back for physical reasons far more often than for legal ones, and a page scanned at an angle is the commonest of them by a distance.
Edinburgh Registration Service, City Chambers, 253 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1YP, keeps the Scottish civil register and issues certified extracts of births, marriages and deaths. A passport reaches you by a different route entirely, so nothing in that building applies to this document — worth knowing before walking up the High Street with the wrong errand in mind.
Cost, timing and the second stage
About £45 covers the FCDO stage, which takes 7–10 business days as standard or 2–3 business days on the express route. Whether a consular stamp follows is settled by the country the file is going to, and that office fixes its own fee, so ask the receiving side whether it wants that stage before you pay for it.
Embassy legalization of a Passport Copy in Edinburgh is rarely the whole errand. The copy usually rides with a degree, a police record or a marriage extract, and sending the set together means one run through the post rather than three. It also leaves every sheet carrying the same date, which reads better at the far end than a scattered bundle.