napari 0.6.5#

⚠️ Note: these release notes are still in draft while 0.6.5 is in release candidate testing. ⚠️

Fri, Sep 26, 2025

We’re happy to announce the release of napari 0.6.5! napari is a fast, interactive, multi-dimensional image viewer for Python. It’s designed for browsing, annotating, and analyzing large multi-dimensional images. It’s built on top of Qt (for the GUI), vispy (for performant GPU-based rendering), and the scientific Python stack (numpy, scipy).

For more information, examples, and documentation, please visit our website, https://napari.org.

Highlights#

  • Add colormap overlay (#7832)

  • add option to define startup script in settings (#8188)

  • Multilayer features table (#8189)

  • Add a tasks manager status for plugins actions and napari processes (#8211)

  • Migrate non-user extras to dependency-groups (#8227)

  • Auto generate release index with highlights and timeline (docs#838)

New Features#

  • Feature: labels layer with a closed predefined set of named labels + combobox selection (#5875)

  • Tiling canvas overlays (#7836)

  • Use information about units when calculate scale of layers when render (#7889)

  • Add hot-reload for the devs (#8007)

  • Cursor overlay (#8017)

  • add option to define startup script in settings (#8188)

  • Multilayer features table (#8189)

Improvements#

  • [Update] Added remove and remove_selected in Shapes and Points (#8031)

  • Add Features using Features Table widget (#8093)

  • Example from SciPy 2025 tutorial; image warping (#8111)

  • Add a tasks manager status for plugins actions and napari processes (#8211)

  • Use single settings path for all uv tool run (#8250)

  • Add “Hide completed” checkbox to Tracks layer for improved visualization (#8253)

  • Handle affine layer metadata when splitting RGB images (#8256)

  • Update the Shapes select_all_shapes action to allow selection in all modes and add notification of number (#8292)

Bug Fixes#

  • Layer controls widgets refactor (#7355)

  • Set the dimensions of the label equal to the maximum value of the layers world (#8098)

  • Fix disappearing points (#8223)

  • Fix shape position by using a stable algorithm for sorting z_position (#8232)

  • Remove console print action shortcut to prevent collision with command palette shortcut (#8233)

  • Do not update thumbnail on Labels empty slice (#8251)

  • fix slice_from_axis to wrap zarr in dask to keep lazy behavior (#8260)

  • Add menu-xdg to XPRA containers (#8263)

  • Check for zarr in images_to_stack and use da.stack instead of np.stack (#8267)

  • Better handling of remote zarr (#8268)

API Changes#

  • Expose force_sync context manager (#7908)

Documentation#

  • Use EffVer (#8243)

  • Add funding information to the home page (docs#818)

  • Update version switcher for 0.6.4 (docs#826)

  • Fix version switcher URL to prevent problems with unversioned pages (docs#827)

  • Update documentation for dependencies groups (docs#829)

  • Update and restructure the preferences guide (docs#834)

  • Fix @jaimergp’s last name (docs#835)

  • Auto generate release index with highlights and timeline (docs#838)

  • Add EffVer to release guide and link to checklist template (docs#839)

Other Pull Requests#

  • Add codespell support (config, workflow to detect/not fix) and make it fix few typos (#7619)

  • Clipping planes control widget (#7993)

  • Add cell tracking example (#8051)

  • [Update] Added pop for Points and Shapes (#8072)

  • Welcome widget as an overlay (#8117)

  • Improve workflow naming by prefixing triage- doc- make- (#8159)

  • Move the test that requires make_napari_viewer from test_qt_viewer (#8176)

  • Bump superqt min version (#8212)

  • Change headless setup for Windows and Linux to pyvista/setup-headless-display-action (#8216)

  • Update coverage, hypothesis, pint, pyopengl, virtualenv, xarray (#8221)

  • [pre-commit.ci] pre-commit autoupdate (#8222)

  • Use global register for units in ScaleBar (#8226)

  • Wait until viewer show in the test in make_napari_viewer (#8228)

  • Update Qt backends used in tests to test more on Qt6 than Qt5 (#8229)

  • Change properties for features usage in the Vectors layer controls (#8231)

  • Add cache for pooch on CI for Linux jobs (#8235)

  • Temporary increase timeout of macOS jobs (#8237)

  • Update coverage, hypothesis, ipython, matplotlib, pyside6, pytest-rerunfailures, tifffile (#8239)

  • ci(dependabot): bump the actions group with 6 updates (#8240)

  • Make connect_setattr handle value conversion for widgets like checkboxes (#8244)

  • Update fsspec, hypothesis, pytest, pytest-rerunfailures, xarray (#8249)

  • [pre-commit.ci] pre-commit autoupdate (#8252)

  • Add typing to points mouse bindings (#8255)

  • Use proper name for ruff pre-commit hook and reorder hooks (#8259)

  • [maint] Revert back to windows-2022 for windows runners (#8265)

  • Update dask, hypothesis, pydantic, qtconsole, scipy, tifffile (#8270)

  • Add napari to trove classifiers to populate builtins on napari hub (#8277)

  • [maint] Drop alpha mentions (#8288)

  • Add release checklist template (#8295)

  • Update coverage, dask, hypothesis, lxml, numpy, psutil, tensorstore, tifffile (#8296)

  • Move Jaime Rodríguez-Guerra to core-team section of CITATION.cff (#8298)

  • Add pooch cache for build docs (docs#830)

  • ci(dependabot): bump the github-actions group with 3 updates (docs#831)

  • Add Jaime Rodríguez-Guerra to core-team (docs#844)

9 authors added to this release (alphabetical)#

(+) denotes first-time contributors 🥳

18 reviewers added to this release (alphabetical)#

(+) denotes first-time contributors 🥳