Planning Center Change Log

Improved: Use HEIC images in pages and sermons

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 23:29:58 GMT

When you take a photo with your mobile phone, it's typically stored in HEIC format. If you wanted to use it on a custom page or sermon, you had to convert it to JPG or PNG first.

Now you can upload the original HEIC file across pages and sermons:

Grid, image, and section header blocks
Sermon images
Podcast art

🩶 The Publishing Team

New: Inline image and attachment support in Services emails

Wed, 12 Aug 2026 17:31:04 GMT

You can now add inline images to your Services emails and email templates, and attach files to any one-off email you send. It matches the experience already available in People, Groups, and Registrations, and every one of your existing templates keeps working exactly as it does today.

For a lot of Team Leaders, email is how you communicate with your teams. But until now, those emails couldn't carry the very thing you were trying to send. If you wanted to send a stage plot, the series artwork, or plan attachment for an upcoming special service, your options were to link out to a file somewhere, build a List in People, or drop into your own email client and rebuild the message from scratch. More often than not, that meant extra steps for a message that should have been simple.

Not anymore.

Inline images now work in every email and email template in Services, and file attachments are available on any one-off email you compose. It matches the experience already available in People, Groups, and Registrations.

Send the actual thing, not a link to it

Attach files directly to a Services email, whether that's a stage plot, an event flyer, or whatever your team needs to open, save, or print. Embed images inline so what you need shows up right in the message instead of hiding behind a "click here."

Use the toolbar controls, drag a file straight in, or paste an image from your clipboard, whichever feels most natural.

Team members get the file in their inbox, no extra clicks required.

Where it works

Inline images are available anywhere you compose an email or edit an email template in Services, including the scheduling templates that welcome new team members, send weekly updates, and notify volunteers of block-out reminders.

Attachments are available on one-off emails you compose to a person or a team. Templates don't support persistent attachments, but inline images cover the most common template use cases.

What about my existing templates?

They’re safe. Every one of your existing Services email templates will continue to render and edit exactly as it does today. We know how much work has gone into the templates that power your scheduling workflows, and this update won’t disrupt any of it. That said, if you’ve been hosting images outside of Planning Center, now might be a good time to update your templates—since you can now paste images directly.

A few practical limits

Same limits as our other email tools, so the experience is consistent across products:

Inline images: JPG, PNG, or GIF, up to 10 MB each, up to 20 per email.
Attachments: up to 10 MB each, up to 5 per email, 10 MB total.
Images wider than the email content area are automatically resized to fit

This is part of a broader effort to make the email experience more consistent across Planning Center, so wherever you write a message, it works the way you'd expect. If there's something else you'd love to see in Services emails, we'd love to hear about it!

The Services Team

Improved: Clearer approval filters for events

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 21:55:58 GMT

We've updated our event status filters to make it clearer whether an event's status refers to the room and resource bookings for the event or to the event itself. What used to be the "approval status" filter is now split into two clearer filters:

"Booking status" covers your room and resource requests, including their approval status and any conflicts.
"Event request status" covers whether the event is pending approvals from a form.

Additionally, events that require approval from a form now appear in the same pending yellow as other events with pending room or resource requests. This makes it easy to identify anything that needs your attention if you're using the "Approval status" color coding.

Team Calendar

Improved: Snooze workflow cards overnight

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 18:33:11 GMT

You can now choose when workflow cards unsnooze and automatically hold new cards that come in after hours.

Workflow steps already let you snooze cards between follow-up messages, and those snoozes end at 7am by default. Now you can set the unsnooze time that works best for your team, and add after-hours rules like “If a card comes in after 7pm, snooze it until 8am” so you’re not prompted to take action until morning.

Team People

New: Create edge-to-edge image stacks with the collection block

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 13:12:05 GMT

One of the most common things we see on Church Center pages is a stack of graphics used as big, tappable buttons — a visual menu of ministries, next steps, or other ways to get involved.

If you have these on your custom pages, you likely used image blocks or section headers. But it was probably hard (or even impossible) to get it just the way you wanted.

Now there’s a single block purpose-built for it. We’ve renamed the grid block to the collection block and expanded it to handle both grid and stack layouts in one place.

Here's what's new:

Layout: Choose between card (items inset with margin around them) or full (edge-to-edge on mobile, no margin between items).
Type: Simply pick grid for two columns on every device or stack for a single column, or use custom to set columns for desktop and mobile separately.
Simplified item options: The settings for each item now live in a single checklist instead of a stack of individual toggles, so it's easier to scan and adjust as you add more items.
Alt text and URL fields: Whenever an item includes an image, you can now add custom alt text, and the URL field shows up any time an image is present.

Whether you're building a simple stack of ministry links or a full photo grid, the collection block flexes to fit.

🩶 The Publishing Team

New: Get notified when events are added to a calendar

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 18:00:53 GMT

You can now choose to be notified whenever someone adds a new event to Calendar! To enable this, open your calendar settings, click the “...” menu, then Notifications. Once enabled, you'll get an email and an in-product notification each time someone adds an event to that calendar so that you always stay in the loop when your team creates new events.

Why this matters

• Stay in the loop without being an approver - Ministry leads and staff can keep an eye on a shared calendar without sitting in the approval chain.

• Catch new additions early - See when something lands on the calendar instead of stumbling onto it later.

• Per-calendar control - Now that events can be organized into separate calendars, you can tailor your notifications so that you'll only hear about the ones that matter to you.

Administrators have long been asking for a better way to stay in the loop on new events in Calendar, and we're so excited to finally deliver on that!

Team Calendar

Improved: Add custom alt text for image blocks

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 15:24:37 GMT

On your Church Center pages, images can provide important context or even written information. But these details are invisible to screen readers unless you include alt text.

To make your custom pages more accessible to low-vision visitors, you can now define custom alt text for image blocks.

Alt text is highly encouraged for all images but especially for ones that link to another page.

🩶 The Publishing Team

New: Connect your AI tools to Check-Ins

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 18:33:45 GMT

You can now connect your AI tools to ask questions about your Check-Ins data. Look up who checked in, review headcounts, see which locations are set up for an event, and track attendance across services — all through natural language questions.

Check-Ins is the latest addition to the Planning Center MCP, joining People, Groups, Services, and Registrations — all of which are already available today. More products are on the way!

If you're already connected, you'll need to reconnect to get access to Check-Ins. Remove your existing connection and add it again, then approve Check-Ins during setup.

Ask about attendance, guests, and headcounts

Here are a few examples to get started:

"Which volunteers checked in on Sunday?"
"Show me all check-ins for VBS this week."
"What are the headcount totals for last week's services?"

What's included

Check-Ins adds five new tools to the MCP:

Events — list and search your Check-Ins events
Event times — see which time slots are configured for each event
Locations — view rooms, age groups, and folder structure for an event
Check-ins — look up individual check-in records with filters for regular attendees, guests, volunteers, one-time visitors, and checked-out status
Headcounts — retrieve manually-recorded attendance tallies by service time

Cross-product questions

Check-Ins works alongside the other connected products. Try questions that span multiple products:

"Is everyone scheduled to serve on Sunday also checked in?"
"Which small group leaders checked into Wednesday night?"
"Show me VBS registrants who also checked in to Summer Camp"

Your data is secure

Check-Ins follows the same security model as the other products. Only people with a Planning Center login can connect, and they'll only see data their permissions allow. Sensitive fields like security codes, medical notes, and emergency contacts are never included in AI responses.

Keeping your private data private

By default, some AI providers may use your conversations to train and improve their models — which means personal information from Planning Center could be included. Most providers offer a setting to opt out of this, and we recommend turning it off before connecting.

For setup instructions and troubleshooting, check out our help article on connecting AI tools to Planning Center.

What’s next

We're actively working on expanding support to even more Planning Center products. Join this group in our community to share feedback and tell us what you'd like to see next. We can't wait to hear how you're using it!

The API Team

New: Resources bulk delete

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 16:54:08 GMT

Bulk delete is now available for resources, making it faster to clean up outdated or unnecessary files from large resource lists. This complements the recent Resource pinning feature by reducing what admins and leaders need to curate.

In Groups, you can navigate to the resources page for a single group or the shared resources page. From there, select multiple resources with the checkboxes on the left, click Delete, and confirm the action. Groups will process the delete in the background and let you know when it’s done.

To help prevent accidental deletes, you’ll see a confirmation step before anything is removed. If your selection includes shared resources, Groups will clearly call that out so you know which resources need to be managed from the shared resources page instead.

Bulk delete is available for group-specific resources based on your role and permissions. Shared resources include an extra warning so they aren’t accidentally removed from places where other groups still rely on them.

Why this helps

Groups resources can pile up over time, especially after seasons, events, or curriculum cycles. Now, admins and leaders can clean up faster with bulk delete. Resource cleanup just got a lot less resource-intensive.

Team Groups

Improved: Easier to find resource actions

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 18:49:24 GMT

The resource download, open link, and edit action buttons have been moved from the far right in each row to now appear directly under the resource name, which makes resource actions easier to find especially in narrower browser windows.

Team Groups