Problem

In sunpy we have come across a case where we want to imshow and image, and then overplot a circle on top of that image. The circle is bigger than the image, and we want to keep the axes limits to those of the image, so ideally we would like a way to add a patch, without the patch updating the data limits. As far as I can tell this isn't possible currently.

To work around this we are using add_artist() instead of add_patch(), but as I understand from #19290 this might change in the future.

Proposed Solution

ax.plot() can take scalex, scaley keywords, that indicate whether the x/y limits are updated, so maybe a similar API for add_patch(), or individual Patch objects would be helpful.

Additional context and prior art