You can use the following basic syntax to save a Matplotlib figure to a file:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt #save figure in various formats plt.savefig('my_plot.png') plt.savefig('my_plot.jpg') plt.savefig('my_plot.pdf')
The following examples show how to use this syntax in practice.
Example 1: Save Matplotlib Figure to PNG File
The following code shows how to save a Matplotlib figure to a PNG file:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt #define data x = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] y = [8, 13, 14, 11, 16, 22] #create scatterplot with axis labels plt.plot(x, y) plt.xlabel('X Variable') plt.ylabel('Y Variable') #save figure to PNG file plt.savefig('my_plot.png')
If we navigate to the location where we saved the file, we can view it:
Example 2: Save Matplotlib Figure with Tight Layout
By default, Matplotlib adds generous padding around the outside of the figure.
To remove this padding, we can use the bbox_inches=’tight’ argument:
#save figure to PNG file with no padding plt.savefig('my_plot.png', bbox_inches='tight')
Notice that there is less padding around the outside of the plot.
Example 3: Save Matplotlib Figure with Custom Size
You can also use the dpi argument to increase the size of the Matplotlib figure when saving it:
#save figure to PNG file with increased size plt.savefig('my_plot.png', dpi = 100)
You can find the complete online documentation for the Matplotlib savefig() function here.
Additional Resources
The following tutorials explain how to perform other common functions in Matplotlib:
How to Set Axis Ranges in Matplotlib
How to Increase Plot Size in Matplotlib
How to Create Multiple Matplotlib Plots in One Figure