Updating Existing Membership Cards After Changing Card Designs

When changing an existing Membership program from a Membership Card design to a Loyalty Card design, existing passes will update to use the new design.

However, on Google Wallet, an existing member's profile image may continue to appear after the design has changed.

This can happen when the member was originally issued with a profile image while using the Membership Card design. Changing the card design does not always remove previously issued member-specific images from the existing Google Wallet pass.

If this happens, an additional update needs to be sent to the affected member to:

You do not need to issue a new pass or ask the member to enrol again.

Before updating existing members:

We recommend testing the update with a single member before applying it to multiple existing members.

Open your Membership program in the PassKit Portal and navigate to the relevant tier in the Designer.

Change the card from a Membership Card design to a Loyalty Card design and configure the new design as required.

Select the strip image you want to use and save your changes.

Existing passes will receive the updated design. However, an existing profile image may remain on the Google Wallet version of the pass.

Open an existing member's pass in Google Wallet after changing the design.

If the member previously had a profile image, check whether that image is still visible.

If the pass displays the new Loyalty Card design correctly and the old profile image has been removed, no additional action is required.

If the old profile image remains, continue with the steps below.

Before updating the member, you will need the image ID of the strip image used by your new Loyalty Card design.

To find the image ID:

You will use this value for:

passOverrides.imageIds.strip

The value must be the PassKit image ID, not the image URL.

Send an update to the affected member using the PassKit Membership API. You can use an API client such as Postman to test the update with a single member.

The update needs to:

Open Postman and create a new request using:

Use the Membership API endpoint for your account region.

Europe

United States

You can check your API region under Account → Developer Tools → API Region in the PassKit Portal.

In Postman, open Authorization, select Bearer Token, and enter your PassKit API token.

Postman will add:

Important: Keep your API token private. Do not include it in screenshots, shared Postman collections or source control.

Open Body, select raw, then select JSON.

Set profileImage to an empty value to explicitly clear the existing profile image:

Leaving profileImage out of the request does not explicitly clear the existing value.

Use passOverrides.imageIds.strip to apply the replacement strip image:

Both changes should be included in the same API request:

Replace:

Before sending the request, confirm your Postman configuration:

Method: PUT
​Endpoint: https://api.pub1.passkit.io/members/member for Europe or https://api.pub2.passkit.io/members/member for the United States
​Authorization: Bearer Token
​Body: raw JSON

Click Send.

If successful, PassKit will update the existing member record and push an update to their Wallet pass.

You do not need to create a new member or ask the member to enrol again. Continue to Step 5 to check that the updated pass displays correctly in Google Wallet.

passOverrides.imageIds can also override supported Google Wallet images for an individual member without changing the underlying template or affecting other members.

For example:

If no member-specific override is provided, the pass will continue to use the image configured in the template.

For the Membership Card to Loyalty Card design change described in this article, use passOverrides.imageIds.strip.

Once the member update has been processed, open the existing pass in Google Wallet.

Confirm that:

The member should not need to remove and reinstall their pass.

If multiple existing members are affected, test the update with a single member first.

For each affected member:

If all affected members should display the same strip image, the same strip image ID can be used for each update.

Once you have confirmed that your test member displays correctly, you can apply the same process to the remaining affected members.

Confirm that the member update explicitly includes:

Leaving profileImage out of the update does not explicitly clear the existing value.

Also allow time for Google Wallet to receive and display the update.

Confirm that you copied the correct image ID from the Template section of the Designer.

The update should contain:

Make sure you are providing a valid PassKit image ID, not an image URL.

This process addresses the scenario where a previously issued profile image remains on the Google Wallet pass after changing from a Membership Card design to a Loyalty Card design.

If Apple Wallet already displays the new design correctly, no equivalent update is required specifically to correct the Apple Wallet design.

Only update members whose existing Google Wallet pass continues to display the old profile image.

If an existing member's pass already displays the new Loyalty Card design correctly, no additional update is required.

After the update has been processed, the existing Google Wallet pass should update without the member needing to enrol again.

The pass should:

Depending on the device and Google Wallet update timing, the changes may not appear immediately.