Problem

When colorbar autocreates an Axes, one can passlocation, which also sets the colorbar's orientation and the ticklocation (left for a left colorbar, right for a right colorbar, etc.). When one instead passes a manually created Axes (e.g. using inset_axes, as suggested by the colorbar_placement.py example), thelocation kwarg is not accepted (because things are directly passed to the Colorbar class); one needs to explicitly setorientation andticklocation (the latter is not even documented byFigure.colorbar):

frompylabimport*sfs=figure(layout="constrained").subfigures(1,2)ax=sfs[0].add_subplot()im=ax.imshow([[0,1], [2,3]])ax.figure.colorbar(im,location="top")ax=sfs[1].add_subplot()im=ax.imshow([[0,1], [2,3]])ax.figure.colorbar(im,cax=ax.inset_axes([0,1.05,1,0.05]),orientation="horizontal",ticklocation="top")show()

Proposed solution

Add alocation kwarg to the Colorbar constructor which sets bothorientation andticklocation, and is mutually exclusive with them.
... or at least better document the workaround.