Incoming deprecations in Photutils v3
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Larry Bradley
Mar 10, 2026, 12:03:18 PM (7 days ago) Mar 10
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Dear Astropy Community,
We wanted to give everyone advance notice of some deprecations coming in the upcoming Photutils 3.0 release that may affect existing code.
Like many packages, photutils has grown organically, and over time some inconsistencies crept into the API, including argument names that didn't follow Python conventions, module locations that felt a bit disconnected from the rest of the package, and output column names that were harder to work with than they needed to be. With 3.0, we're taking the opportunity to clean things up and bring photutils in line with the naming conventions used throughout the broader astropy ecosystem.
The old names still work with a deprecation warning. The warnings are designed to be informative, pointing users directly to what needs to change. The migration path is straightforward, and we hope that the new names will be more intuitive and easier to work with in the long run. These deprecations are part of a broader effort to improve the consistency and usability of photutils, and we believe that the benefits will outweigh the temporary inconvenience of updating code.
We know that even well-documented changes like these can cause disruption, and we appreciate your patience. We've tried to make the migration path as smooth as possible, and backward compatibility will be maintained throughout the 3.0 cycle. These deprecations will not be removed until Photutils 4.0, which is expected to be released no earlier than early 2027.
For the full details, including a tour of the new features alongside the deprecations, please see the "What's New in Photutils 3.0" page:
https://photutils.readthedocs.io/en/latest/whats_new/3.0.html
In particular, the "New Deprecations" section describes everything that has changed and what to use instead.
If you have questions or run into anything unexpected, please don't hesitate to
open an issue on the photutils GitHub repository.
Cheers,
Larry
We wanted to give everyone advance notice of some deprecations coming in the upcoming Photutils 3.0 release that may affect existing code.
Like many packages, photutils has grown organically, and over time some inconsistencies crept into the API, including argument names that didn't follow Python conventions, module locations that felt a bit disconnected from the rest of the package, and output column names that were harder to work with than they needed to be. With 3.0, we're taking the opportunity to clean things up and bring photutils in line with the naming conventions used throughout the broader astropy ecosystem.
The old names still work with a deprecation warning. The warnings are designed to be informative, pointing users directly to what needs to change. The migration path is straightforward, and we hope that the new names will be more intuitive and easier to work with in the long run. These deprecations are part of a broader effort to improve the consistency and usability of photutils, and we believe that the benefits will outweigh the temporary inconvenience of updating code.
We know that even well-documented changes like these can cause disruption, and we appreciate your patience. We've tried to make the migration path as smooth as possible, and backward compatibility will be maintained throughout the 3.0 cycle. These deprecations will not be removed until Photutils 4.0, which is expected to be released no earlier than early 2027.
For the full details, including a tour of the new features alongside the deprecations, please see the "What's New in Photutils 3.0" page:
https://photutils.readthedocs.io/en/latest/whats_new/3.0.html
In particular, the "New Deprecations" section describes everything that has changed and what to use instead.
If you have questions or run into anything unexpected, please don't hesitate to
open an issue on the photutils GitHub repository.
Cheers,
Larry
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