Feature request: Load/Store features

[jo-mueller]

It would be cool to be able to load and store layer.features from/to OMERO. This would give the opportunity for some really cool interoperability with other plugins, such as the napari-clusters-plotter. Especially with #76 in the current state, it would be possible to load a bunch of images (+ROIs) (+features) and explore them interactively.

This would probably require a convention as to where or how features should be stored. I could see them going to tables attached to OMERO images. Maybe they would have to be tagged accordingly to identify them reliably.

Would be happy for any thoughts on the matter :)

[psobolewskiPhD]

Great thought!
I agree that it would be a really nice feature if someone could

• use napari to visualize and interact with things stored in OMERO.tables (computed from some other script or simply pre-existing)
• use python/napari to compute some features and then push them to OMERO.tables for others to access

[psobolewskiPhD]

Apropos the napari features table: https://napari.org/stable/tutorials/fundamentals/features.html#features-table-widget

[jo-mueller]

@psobolewskiPhD I started implementing this - turns out it's not so hard at all 🤩 That's pretty much how I envisioned it:

01.12.2025_17.15.30_REC-ezgif.com-video-speed.mp4

Points to think about:

• Loading ROIs/features lazily? I think the ROI loading and the feature loading can be quite slow for reasons, so that may be something to look into
• Grid mode was probably not intended for that kind of display, maybe it's possible to turn it off (or offset images by translation? Could potentially mess with metadata from image itself)

EDIT: Took me a while to get table storage on OMERO right, maybe something to document a little better on the omero end of things 🤔

[psobolewskiPhD]

Wow the video looks pretty awesome! I'm not sure I follow your comment about grid mode?
I don't think I have access to any images in omero with tables to test but I will ask around.

[jo-mueller]

I'm not sure I follow your comment about grid mode?

For entirely different images I don't think the linked pan/zoom makes so much sense.

I don't think I have access to any images in omero with tables to test but I will ask around.

Was planning to document what I learned along with a small code snippet to generate example data 👍

[psobolewskiPhD]

But the user can enable/disable grid using the viewer button, so... 🤷