What a relief. My awful workaround was photos of all my membership barcodes labeled with a sharpie so that I can search "Gym" or "Library" or whatever to pull them up from OCR indexing.
Pass2U Wallet works great, but like many apps, it really should just be a feature to begin with.
The weird thing is that this was a feature when Wallet was first introduced. You could create a URL that would add a pass to a wallet. There were web sites that helped out with it. I still have some of the passes I created this way a decade or more ago.
Pass2U is neat because you can make somewhat arbitrary "Cards" with it. Cards with nice layouts that include QR code, images, titles, text, whatever. I have a card for my drone license, insurance, medical, and a few others. Super handy. It would be neat if they allowed that level of customization in the wallet app itself, but this is Apple.
I'm using MakePass for ages now. Got it when it was still a single purchase and got grandfathered into their new license model. It allows you to use almost all features of the PassKit API. Very happy with it - let's see how the native feature compares.
These apps never worked for me at my gym. The app successfully (it seemed) scanned my barcode on my gym card, but the gym's scanner never was able to pick it up from my phone's screen at max brightness, adjusting zoom etc.
I've been using Pass4Wallet for the last few years to create Wallet entries for local clubs I'm apart of.
It's actually better than native passes in some cases because you can add custom info to the entry, like a gate code. It's really flexible in terms of barcodes, QR codes, etc as well.
Great app I'll probably continue using, I'm not confident Apple will allow the amount of customizability it allows.
Some time ago I built a really simple app to do this as well, called PeekCard[1]. But I actually hope Apple Wallet does it better. What I'm wondering about is whether there will be decent barcode support and if it will support widgets.
There's many third party apps that can already create passes based on pictures. They are just adding that feature to the OS which is great of course but it has already been possible for a long time, except that there's one more step of downloading an app...but should still be quicker than searching your library every time.
FYI you can add description text to a photo in the (default) Photos app. Just swipe up and there should be a text box. You can (usually) find a photos based on what you've written
It's not awful on its own, but the alternative could be double-tapping the power button and having them immediately available on screen in a nice scroll UX along with everything else you consider to be in your "wallet".
As someone who does roughly the same thing, the language used to describe the new capabilities isn't encouraging to me; I don't want to "add a pass", I want to "add a photo" and bypass all of this other complexity entirely.
