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.