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Building the napari Plugin Sustainability Initiative
- 2026 February 22
napari is an open-source, multidimensional image viewer for Python that provides core infrastructure for visualizing and annotating scientific imaging data. Its extendable GUI has empowered a diverse ecosystem of over 580 community-developed plugins. Since the public announcement of napari in 2019 and the addition of plugin support soon after, collaboration among core contributors, plugin authors, and users has enabled research workflows that no single library could accomplish alone. One advantage of napari and its plugin ecosystem is that it enables advanced scientific processing, without necessarily requiring any code, lowering the barrier to entry for domain scientists who need powerful tools to analyze their data. In this way, napari serves as an entry point into scientific programming for many researchers.
In recent years, however, collaboration between plugin developers and the napari core team has declined, leading to challenges in keeping plugins up to date and aligned with napari’s evolving architecture. With financial support from the United States Research Software Sustainability Institute (URSSI) Early Career Fellowship, I’ve been working with the napari community since October 2025 to improve the plugin ecosystem’s sustainability. Our goal is to build infrastructure and practices that other scientific software communities can learn from and adapt.
Xarray ❤️ napari
- 2025 October 24
This post is cross-posted on the Xarray blog.
Making napari and Xarray work better together will benefit many users. This has been long desired by the community but due to various roadblocks never implemented. At the SciPy 2025 sprints we formed a plan to implement a stronger integration.
Towards long-term sustainability for napari
- 2025 October 21
The napari project has had a big year, with lots of new releases, community initiatives, and an expanding core team. In this post, we want to share the work supported by our current grant funding, the ongoing effort required to maintain the project, our current thoughts for ensuring napari’s long-term financial sustainability and the new funding models that we’re exploring to support the project’s needs.
We want your thoughts and feedback, so please fill out this short
survey by November 1st
[Edit: deadline extended to November 16th!] to help guide our next steps!
Announcing the napari public roadmap
- 2025 July 03
We’re excited to share what’s coming next for napari! After months of listening to our community and carefully planning our path forward, we’re ready to pull back the curtain on our new development roadmap. Whether you’re a longtime napari user or just discovering what we’re all about, this roadmap is our way of showing you where we’re headed and why we think you’ll love what’s coming.
Earlier this year, we were awarded the CZI scaffolding grant, for USD$1.7M over four years. For the first time since napari’s inception, we can fund dedicated development, community-management and project operations roles. This is an important milestone that has allowed us to step back, assess our goals, and chart a clear path toward long-term sustainability of the project, beyond the grant duration.
Triangles Speedup – call for beta testers
- 2025 January 20
We are excited to announce that significant performance improvements are coming to napari Shapes layers.
Shapes layers in napari represent 2D geometric objects, — rectangles, circles, polygons, paths… — possibly embedded in a higher-dimensional space, for example, 2D polygons of cell outlines within a 3D image stack. Vispy, which powers napari’s graphics, uses OpenGL to draw on the screen. The fundamental unit of OpenGL graphics is triangles, which can be put together to draw more complex shapes such as polygons. This means that we have a preproprocessing step in napari to break down input shapes into triangles. This step is called triangulation.