Get legend as a separate picture in Matplotlib

Question

I\'m developing a Web application and want to display a figure and its legend in different locations on the page. Which means I need to save the legend as a separate png fil

Answer 1

It is possible to use axes.get_legend_handles_labels to get the legend handles and labels from one axes object and to use them to add them to an axes in a different figure.

# create a figure with one subplot
fig = plt.figure()
ax = fig.add_subplot(111)
ax.plot([1,2,3,4,5], [1,2,3,4,5], 'r', label='test')
# save it *without* adding a legend
fig.savefig('image.png')

# then create a new image
# adjust the figure size as necessary
figsize = (3, 3)
fig_leg = plt.figure(figsize=figsize)
ax_leg = fig_leg.add_subplot(111)
# add the legend from the previous axes
ax_leg.legend(*ax.get_legend_handles_labels(), loc='center')
# hide the axes frame and the x/y labels
ax_leg.axis('off')
fig_leg.savefig('legend.png')

If for some reason you want to hide only the axes label, you can use:

ax.xaxis.set_visible(False)
ax.yaxis.set_visible(False)

or if, for some weirder reason, you want to hide the axes frame but not the axes labels you can use:

ax.set_frame_on(False)

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ps: this answer has been adapted from my answer to a duplicate question