Posted in 2026
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.