Release Notes#
Each section shows the highlights from recent releases. Click on the version links to view the complete release notes.
Last updated: October 03, 2025
Recent Releases (Last 3 Months)#
Latest features and improvements:
napari 0.6.5 (October 2025)
This a sizeable release containing a few new exciting features and a lot of bugfixes.
EffVer and no more alpha
It is our first release officially following the EffVer versioning scheme. We also took this occasion to (finally!) remove the Alpha qualifier from the project (#8288), to better reflect the reality of the extensive use of napari in production. Note that these changes are just formally bringing up to date the state of the project: our development continues as before!
Define a startup script for custom launch behaviour
Do you have a code snippet that you always find yourself running after you launch napari? No more! You can now put this code in a script and set its path in the new startup script setting (#8188), and it will be executed every time napari opens. It’s just a python script, so sky’s the limit :) We found it particularly useful for adding custom colormaps, setting up the scale bar just right, or automatically launching our favourite plugin on startup.
Automatically tiled overlays and ColorBar overlay
Canvas overlays such as scale_bar, text_overlay, and colorbar overlay are now automatically tiling (#7836), preventing annoying overlap and making them easier to use without having to manage positioning. Wait, colorbar overlay you said? You heard it right! This is a new overlay (#7832) that shows a color bar legend, and it works with any layer which uses a colormap. All of this works seamlessly with multiple overlays and even grid mode:
import napari
viewer = napari.Viewer()
# enable grid with stride 2 to get layers split two-by-two
viewer.grid.enabled = True
viewer.grid.stride = 2
# set the scale bar to gridded mode so it appears in each grid box
viewer.scale_bar.visible = True
viewer.scale_bar.gridded = True
layers = viewer.open_sample('napari', 'lily')
# enable color bars
for layer in layers:
layer.colorbar.visible = True
Alternatively, you may also activate the colorbar (and other layer-related overlays such as bounding_box) from the graphical interface by right clicking on selected layers in the layerlist and toggling the relative entries in the Visualization submenu (#8319).
Task manager will now try to prevent losing unfinished work
We added a new task manager (#8211) which automatically registers any running thread_worker, showing a confirmation dialog if you attempt to close napari while a task is running.
New remove and pop methods for Points and Shapes
Points and Shapes can now be easily removed, not just added :P (#8031 and #8072).
A few shiny new updates to our website and documentation
napari.org can now be visited in dark mode (docs#840)! You could try out this new relaxing colorscheme while exploring the new overhauled Preferences documentation section 😉 (docs#834). There’s also new sections on viewer overlays and layer overlays, to better explain how to use these old and new tools. Our release notes page also received a glow-up (docs#838), displaying past release highlights in collapsible boxes in the timeline. This should make it easier to quickly catch up when updating across multiple releases!
Extra dependencies for development moved to dependency groups
A note for our contributors and plugin developers: we transferred our dev-related extra dependencies to the new python dependency groups (#8227). The installation is therefore slightly different, for example: pip install napari --group testing instead of pip install napari[testing]. The previous method will continue to work, but we will likely remove the old optional-dependences approach in a future release.
napari 0.6.4 (August 2025)
Run scripts with napari from the command line
As a follow-up to the ability to drag-n-drop scripts into the napari window from 0.6.3, you can now run scripts directly from the command line using the napari command and the path to the script (#8185 and #8187).
To open a local napari and run a local script, enter: napari examples/magic_immage_arithmetic.py.
You can also run scripts from a remote location (#8208), including Github, Gist, Gitlab, and the napari gallery.
To run a remote script, for example, enter: napari https://github.com/napari/napari/blob/main/examples/grid_mode.py.
If you have uv you can even run a script without installing napari by using uvx --with "napari[gallery,all]" napari https://napari.org/stable/_downloads/55f878f7d41dc4c7c2e28483653273cb/affine_coffee_cup.py, serving as a clever way to trial napari or share your script. As always with remote connections, only use this feature with scripts you trust.
Toggling the napari console now places focus on the console
Toggling the napari console (with the keyboard (Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+C), GUI, or command palette) will now transfer focus on the console, allowing you to immediately start typing commands without needing to click into the console first (#8182). We have found this to be a very useful feature for a keyboard-centric workflow combining the power of the command palette and console together.
napari 0.6.3 (July 2025)
A Zoom with a View 🔍
Pardon the play on words, but you can now zoom directly to a region of interest in the viewer by holding Alt and dragging with the mouse (#8004). The camera will pan and zoom to fit the selected region, making it much easier to focus on specific areas of your data. This feature works in both 2D and 3D views.
Fine Tuning Thick Slicing from the GUI 📏
Thick slicing controls are now available in the GUI (#6146)! This allows you to project multiple slices together using different modes (sum, mean, max, and min) for better visualization of your multidimensional data. You can access the thickness controls by right-clicking on the dimension sliders to open a popup to change the margins either symmetrically or asymmetrical and projection mode settings are now available per layer in the layer controls widget.
Run Scripts by Dragging and Dropping into the Viewer 🖱️
Scripts can now be run by dragging and dropping them into the viewer (#8135)! This is particularly useful for running napari examples without having to use the command line; you can even run these scripts from the bundled install! This works by adding a .py reader to napari’s builtins.
Windows: Access ~~Denied~~ Fixed 🪟
A critical Windows-specific bug that caused Access Violation errors has been resolved (#8122)! This longstanding issue would cause napari to stop displaying layers due to various events and often occurred at seemingly non-reproducible times, and required a full restart of napari. The fix ensures proper cleanup and syncing of GPU resources, also reducing memory usage on all platforms. If you were an effected user, you may recall it as Access Violation, 0x000000000000001C if triggered without a plugin, or 0x000000000000034C if triggered with a plugin.
Improved PySide6 Support 🛠️
Napari now has improved support for PySide6 (#7887). We encourage plugin developers to test against PySide6, as a fully supported backend going forward. Additionally, this change will enable us to drop PySide2 along side Python 3.10, in the near future. If you are a plugin developer or otherwise depend on napari and PySide2, please reach out on Zulip or Github.
Releases from 3-6 Months Ago#
napari 0.6.2 (July 2025)
The amazing new Grid mode! 🗺️
The visualization of Grid mode has been redone from the ground up! This new Grid mode (#7870) now puts each layer into its own view (a VisPy Viewbox) with cameras linked together. Now, you can pan and zoom one view, and all other views in the grid will follow along. Layers are no longer awkwardly transformed into the same world space and displayed in a grid, only to make comparing the details of each a challenge.
Grid based exploration is now fluid, fast, and intuitive, especially when working with large images and 3D+ data! The mouse can even be used over one View, while updating the data, such as a label or shape annotation, in the selected layer of a different view. The usual napari overlays can now also be added to each grid, instead of just the canvas (eg. viewer.scale_bar.gridded = True).
Grid mode spacing now works proportionally to the layer extents (i.e. [0,1), as in 0.6.0) or as a pixel value [1,1500) and will automatically adjust if needed.
To coincide with this new Grid mode, we have chosen to reverse the ordering of layers in the grid (#8053). The first layer added to the viewer will now be at the top left of the grid, and the last layer added will be at the bottom right; new layers will be added to the bottom right of the grid. If you prefer the previous behavior, you can set the Grid Stride to -1 in the Preferences dialog.
The Features Table Widget is now a napari builtin! 📊
The features table from napari-properties-viewer is now a builtin widget in napari (#7877) and greatly improved! This widget allows you to view and edit the properties of Points, Shapes, and Labels layers in a table widget.
The widget can be opened from the Layers menu -> Visualize -> Features table widget (napari builtins) or from the command palette. You can also save the properties table to a CSV file. Check out the Features table widget example to learn more.
Community developments! 📅
We are excited to share our new active roadmap which is a living document that will be updated as we continue to develop napari. This document is intended to help the community understand the priorities of the napari team and to help us all work together to make napari better.
We are also now including all napari related events in the community calendar and as an image.sc post, including conferences, tutorials, sprints, virtual seminars, and more. If you have an event you would like to add, please reach out to us!
Some great features for contributors! 🛠️
Contributing documentation is now a much smoother experience! By default, new documentation will build in around 3 minutes, instead of the previous 20 minutes. This speed is thanks to new, slimmer
makecommands (slimfastby default) that can also be triggered in PRs with a bot (eg.@napari-bot make docs). Read our updated docs contribution guide and reach out for help.The organization of the napari repo has been updated by moving into a
src/directory (#7952). This is modern best practice in Python projects (and what has long been standard in our napari-plugin-template) to avoid issues with relative imports and should now always result in importing the napari version installed in the current environment. For developers, especially of pull requests prior to this release, you may have many merge conflicts to resolve. Please ping the napari team if you would like help resolving these conflicts.There is now public API to access widgets docked in the viewer (#7965). Check out the new documentation on the napari website to learn more about using this API to communicate between widgets. If you previously used
viewer.window._dock_widgets, you should now useviewer.window.dock_widgets.
napari 0.6.1 (May 2025)
The HiLo👋 Colormap!
Introducing the HiLo colormap to napari! 🎨 This much-loved colormap (LUT) is like grayscale, except it displays values at or above the maximum contrast limit as red 🔴 and values at or below the minimum contrast limit as blue 🔵. In the scientific imaging world, the HiLo colormap is often used to assess overexposed (saturated) ☀️ and underexposed (dark) 🌑 regions in images.
Enjoy this animation of the HiLo colormap in action! 👇
The HiLo colormap is now available as a result of the dependency bump to VisPy 0.15.0 (#7846), which will soon unlock even more great new features in the coming napari releases.
The dims widget shines brighter! ✨
Have you ever tried to use the dims pop-up widget (accessed by right clicking on the third viewer button) and found it to not work as expected? As part of our bugfixes #7937 , the dims widget will continue to interact as expected. The widget is now available in 3D view!
❓Did you know that the dims widget allows you to rename the axis labels of your data?
napari 0.6.0 (May 2025)
Summary
Updated viewer handedness ✋
Command palette 🎨
Display polygons with holes ⛳️
Transition to npe2 plugin engine by default 🔌
Many other GUI improvements 🖥️
Updated viewer handedness ✋
So. Funny story. 😅
For (checks notes) 5 years or so, napari has had a 3D view, and for those 5 years, for almost all datasets, that view has been a mirror image of the 3D object they were trying to represent. Any biologists among you might have noticed that loading 3D molecular coordinates of DNA would result in a left-handed helix, while anatomists among you might have been surprised by how many of your samples suffered from situs inversus totalis!
By and large, many things that people care about work exactly the same in the mirror world — volume measurements, forces, tracking, speed, … — so this bug has gone mostly unnoticed, or noticed and shrugged off and unfixed for all this time. But it’s important for some things! Your heart is on the left side of your body, but the right side of your mirror image’s. This can be critical, for example, when using software to plan surgery! Thankfully, we are not aware of any cases of napari being used in this way. 😅
napari uses zyx coordinates instead of xyz because it is the most natural way to work with NumPy arrays and the rest of the scientific Python imaging ecosystem. Flipping the axes in this way also changes the handedness of the space, unless you also flip the direction of one of the dimensions. The simplest way to illustrate this is this 3D model of a right shoe, which looks like this in previous versions of napari:
and in 0.6.0, thanks to #7554:
Most users won’t notice. But if you were among the users that noticed and you implemented workarounds in your code (such as setting the z-scale to a negative number), now is a good time to undo the workarounds for newer versions of napari! If you run into any issues please get in touch on GitHub issues or on our Zulip chat room!
On the user space, we now offer several options to orient the axes any way you like:
Through the camera API: the
Viewer.camerainstance gains two new attributes:orientation, andorientation2d, which is just the last two dimensions oforientation. You can set the direction that the depth, vertical, and horizontal axes point to, respectively in that order, as follows (#7663):
# 2D
viewer.camera.orientation2d = ('up', 'right')
# 3D
viewer.camera.orientation = ('away', 'up', 'right')
See an example of this in action in Displaying xarray data in napari.
Through the UI: By right clicking on the dimension toggle in the viewer, and setting the axis orientations using the drop-down menus (#7686), which in 3D will further indicate whether the resulting coordinate frame is right-handed or left-handed (#7770):
Through the startup settings: If you want to use a specific axis orientation consistently, you can set the default orientation on startup by changing the relevant settings (#7787:
To restore the orientation from napari 0.5.6 and earlier, change the Depth axis setting to “away” (i.e. depth axis points away from you).
Command palette 🎨
Tired of mousing around? Thanks to #5483, napari gains a command palette! Press Ctrl/Command+Shift+P and start typing the name of the action you want to use, and press Enter when you’ve highlighted it. It even works with plugins! This is the culmination of many months of work porting napari’s actions to Talley Lambert’s app-model. 🥳
There’s still lots of work to be done here, but in the meantime, give it a try! We on the team have found it very hard to go back to using napari without the palette!
Feature improvements to Shapes layers ⛳️
⚠️ When using numba for triangulation, some shapes will still not be drawn
correctly, due to a bug in VisPy. We recommend installing bermuda, our new
fast triangulation package, for the best performance. ⚠️
Finally, napari Shapes layers can now display polygons with holes in them, which starts to open it up for use with mapping data, among other things! (#7566, #6654]) Implementing this feature also eliminated a lot of bugs in our polygon drawing code, which could cause crashes. If you’ve had issues with Shapes layers before, now might be a good time to give them another try!
As part of this work, napari gained the ability to select between different
backends for triangulation, which means breaking up polygons into collections
of triangles, which is what GPUs are good at drawing.
(#7747) To use the new backends,
install the relevant package (for example, bermuda,
partsegcore-compiled-backend, or numba), then go to Settings > Experimental
> triangulation backend. (If you use napari[all], you will have bermuda
installed and it will be used automatically, as the default option is “fastest
available”.)
Transition to npe2 plugin engine 🔌
npe2 was introduced over four years ago, with napari 0.4.12. npe2 has paved the way for new plugin functionality, such as adding menu items and the command palette. We are now beginning the process of deprecating npe1 (napari-plugin-engine) plugins, which we need to do to continue to improve npe2 functionality, for example in file readers, which is currently very entangled with npe1 code.
To aid this migration, npe1 plugins will now be automatically converted to npe2 by default. This may break some features if the plugins relied on import-time behavior. (#7627)
During the 0.6.x series, if some plugin functionality is broken by the automatic conversion, you can turn off this conversion in the plugin preferences. However, the option to not convert npe1 plugins will be removed in 0.7.0, and npe1 plugins will only work through automatic conversion. We anticipate 0.7.0 will be released in the second half of 2025.
If you encounter conversion issues in a plugin you rely on, please contact the plugin authors to encourage them to migrate their plugin to the npe2 system.
For more details on this change and how it affects plugins, see the detailed guide. If you are a plugin author and your plugin is not yet npe2-compatible, please see our npe2 migration guide, and, if you encounter any issues, get in touch in our Plugins Zulip chat channel or by coming to one of our community meetings.
GUI improvements 🖥️
You’ll notice the main napari GUI is subtly (or not so subtly) different in 0.6.0. Here are some of the improvements:
Buttons now have an indicator to show whether they contain an extra menu when right-clicking. (#7556)
The button to change between 2D and 3D views much more clearly shows what it does. (#7608)
… And it has an extra menu with lots of options to control the camera! (#7626)
You can now add a bit of spacing between layers in grid mode (and control it in the grid mode right-click menu!) (#7597)
The colormap indicator in image layers is now a button, allowing you to create a linear colormap with any color! (#7600)
If you select multiple layers in the layer list, you can now see the status display of all the selected layers in the status bar (#7673)
If you switch from 2D to 3D view and back again, your 3D viewing angle will be preserved (#7765)
Notice some weird behavior? Our new log handler and viewer might help! Access it with Help > Show logs. (#6900)
Other stuff
For developers: napari now depends on Python 3.10+ (#7603 and Pydantic v2.2 (#7589).
We’ve supported both pydantic 1 and 2 since 0.4.19, but we’re now ready to take advantage of performance and API improvements in Pydantic 2. If your library depends on Pydantic 1.x, now would be a good time to upgrade, or it will not be compatible with napari going forward.
If you were dreading 0.6.0 because you were relying on _qt_viewer features,
worry not: we have again postponed that deprecation while we add the required
APIs. 😅 (#7730)
Also, if you’ve been wanting to contribute that doc fix but found the process daunting, it’s now easier than ever, because our default documentation preview build is now much faster! You can propose changes from the GitHub UI and see the rendered results in only two minutes! (napari/docs#669)
Releases from 6-12 Months Ago#
napari 0.5.6 (January 2025)
Faster shapes 🚀
For its whole history, napari has been a pure Python package. As we go deeper into its performance bottlenecks, though, we’re finding that we need some compiled code. This is a big change to the napari installation story, though, so we are rolling it out slowly. But if you’ve been waiting forever to load your shapes data, this release has some enhancements for you (>2x speedup)! (#7346)
To use this speedup, you’ll need to:
install napari core developer Grzegorz Bokota’s collection of performant algorithms, PartSegCore-compiled-backend. You can install it automatically by pip installing
"napari[optional,pyqt]"(or a GUI backend of your choice among pyqt, pyqt6, pyside, pyside6) or"napari[all]".and, in the napari advanced settings, tick the “Use C++ code to speed up creation and updates of Shapes layers” box.
Please give it a try and let us know if you encounter any issues! This is the beginning of a new era of performance improvements in napari, to help it live up to its promise of a fast viewer for n-dimensional data in Python!
New path drawing tool
Drawing paths is easier and smoother with the open-line equilavent of the lasso tool. If you want to draw a curve through your data, whether with a mouse or a tablet+stylus, it is now much easier to freehand rather than clicking on individual points. Try it out! (#7099)
Other improvements
Often, the important information in a layer name is at the end of the name rather than the beginning. We’ve improved the eliding (…) of long names by placing the ellipsis in the middle of the name rather than the end (#7461).
The default value of “flash” has been changed to False in
viewer.screenshot, so that taking many screenshots in a script will not
result in rapid flickering
(#7476). This is part of a
broader accessibility initiative by recent contributor Tim
Monko to improve napari for light-sensitive
users (#7433, and we are so
grateful! 🙏
Read on for the full list of changes since 0.5.5.
napari 0.5.5 (December 2024)
This release continues the 0.5 tradition of churning out the bug fixes and enhancements, with 24 pull requests total in that category. If you are a user of oblique plane rendering, you’ll appreciate #7422, which fixes the plane calculation when data is anisotropic.
And, did you have a hole in your heart where high-quality 3D labels rendering should have been? Check out #7431, in which Ashley Anderson has (again) improved the quality of 3D labels by filling the (apparent, but fictional) holes in labels at the borders of a volume. Before/after gif:
Additionally, Grzegorz Bokota has again sped up launch time for Shapes layers by porting all the edge triangulation code to numba (#7268). As part of that work he also created a fantastic developer example explaining how the edge triangulation works, which you can find at examples/dev/triangle_edge.py. Give it a read and a play if you want to peek under the hood of the Shapes layer!
Did you miss a napari error or warning while reading these notes? We don’t blame you! Those missed notifications will be a thing of the past with #7220, which will keep notifications open if the napari window is not in focus. Whew!
Finally, for the zarrventurous among you, napari 0.5.5 is ready for zarr v3, coming soon to a PyPI near you! (#7215) If you are using or testing the zarr 3.0.0 betas, try them with napari! We hope you’ll be pleasantly surprised. 😊
As always, we thank all the contributors to this napari release and all the previous ones! We welcome Carol Willing and Tim Monko to the list of contributors. Read on for all the changes in this version!
Read on for all the changes in this version!
Older Releases#
napari 0.5.4 (September 2024) - Another release with a lot of bug fixes, but also some (more!) improvements to Shapes layer performance ([#7144](napari/napari#pull…
napari 0.5.3 (August 2024) - This is primarily a bug-fix release, including fixes for a couple of nasty regressions in 0.5.0 (#7184) …
napari 0.5.2 (August 2024) - This is primarily a bug-fix release, but we snuck a couple of new features in there, including smoother, prettier, better rendering of Labels volumes …
napari 0.5.1 (July 2024) - napari 0.5.1 is a bugfix release hot on the heels of napari 0.5.0. It fixes a critical bug with creating viewers
napari 0.5.0 (July 2024) - napari 0.5.0 is the beginning of an architectural overhaul of napari. The architecture improvements, which are still ongoing, enable more responsive
napari 0.4.19 - This release mostly contains a lot of bug fixes and performance improvements. But look out for 0.5.0, coming to a software repository near you — we ex…
napari 0.4.18 - - Drawing polygons in the Shapes layer can now be done much faster with the new lasso tool ([napari/napari/#5555](napari/napari…
napari 0.4.17 - This release is focused on documentation improvements and bug fixes, with few changes to napari’s API. We picked out a few highlights, but keep readin…
napari 0.4.16 - - Added sphinx-gallery (#4288) - Add NAP process for major proposals (#4299)
napari 0.4.15 - This release is focused on documentation improvements and bug fixes, with few changes to napari’s API. The napari documentation is now entirely contai…
napari 0.4.14 - - Enable shapes layer (right click) > convert to labels (#3978) - Out-of-slice rendering for Vectors (#2902)
napari 0.4.13 - - Spherical Points (#3430) - Point selection in 3d (#3508)
napari 0.4.12 - This is a bug fix release with many minor improvements and bug fixes. The user experience for users of dask arrays might be significantly improved by …
napari 0.4.11 - This release introduces ways to interact with data in 3D (#3037). Features like label picking (#3074) and label painting/erasing (#3108) now work in 3…
napari 0.4.10 - This is a fairly small release, that follows on quickly from 0.4.9 to fix a regression in our ability to save layer data (fixed in #2876). It also con…
napari 0.4.9 - This release adds a couple nice new features like additional shading modes for our surface layer (#2972) and the ability to copy a screenshot directly…
napari 0.4.8 - This release adds a new plugin type (i.e. a hook specification) for plugins to provide sample data (#2483). No more demos with
np.random! 🎉 We’ve ad…napari 0.4.7 - After nearly a year of planning, thanks to help from the fine folks at Quansight, napari now has a preferences dialog!
napari 0.4.6 - This release is the first that adds support for persistent settings in napari (#2212). Right now we just store the current theme and window geometry b…
napari 0.4.5 - This release is our first release using Jupyter Book to build our documentation (#2187) which can be seen at https://napari.org/docs/dev/, or
napari 0.4.4 - This release is a quick follow on from our
0.4.3release and contains some nice improvements to the GUI and analysis function hookspecs we experimen…napari 0.4.3 - In this release we’ve added two new analysis and GUI focused [hook specifications](napari/napari…
napari 0.4.2 - This is an emergency patch release to fix a regression in
0.4.1that broke magicgui generated dockwidgets which accepted layers as input (#1962). Th…napari 0.4.1 - This release follows our recent 0.4.0 release with a number of bug fixes and small improvements. We fixed a regression that caused the status bar to a…
napari 0.4.0 - napari 0.4.0 is the culmination of months of improvements to our data models. It finally brings the data from all layers into a consistent, global coo…
napari 0.3.8 - This release is mainly a bug fix release, with a number of small improvements including around our contrast limits updates (#1622) and points coloring…
napari 0.3.7 - With this release, we are launching an experimental standalone app (#1289). You can find it on our [GitHub releases
napari 0.3.6 - This release contains the long awaited addition of text to both the points and shapes layers (#1374). Checkout our
examples/*_with_text.pyfor simpl…napari 0.3.5 - This release contains a number of bug fixes on various platforms. For those interested in napari performance, we have added a new performance monitori…
napari 0.3.0 - ### Community and governance
napari 0.2.11 - - Point face color and edge color are now settable as a property in a columnar data table, mapped using a colormap (continuous values) or a color cy…
napari 0.2.9 - - better support for surface timeseries (#831) - contrast limits slider popup on right click (#837)
napari 0.2.7 - - Play button for animating axes now in the GUI - Threshold slider for much improved isosurface rendering