How to save a Seaborn plot into a file

Question

I tried the following code (test_seaborn.py):

import matplotlib
matplotlib.use(\'Agg\')
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
matplotlib.style.use(\'g         


        

Answer 1

The suggested solutions are incompatible with Seaborn 0.8.1

giving the following errors because the Seaborn interface has changed:

AttributeError: 'AxesSubplot' object has no attribute 'fig'
When trying to access the figure

AttributeError: 'AxesSubplot' object has no attribute 'savefig'
when trying to use the savefig directly as a function

The following calls allow you to access the figure (Seaborn 0.8.1 compatible):

swarm_plot = sns.swarmplot(...)
fig = swarm_plot.get_figure()
fig.savefig(...) 

as seen previously in this answer.

UPDATE: I have recently used PairGrid object from seaborn to generate a plot similar to the one in this example. In this case, since GridPlot is not a plot object like, for example, sns.swarmplot, it has no get_figure() function. It is possible to directly access the matplotlib figure by

fig = myGridPlotObject.fig

Like previously suggested in other posts in this thread.

Answer 2

Fewer lines for 2019 searchers:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import seaborn as sns

df = sns.load_dataset('iris')
sns_plot = sns.pairplot(df, hue='species', height=2.5)
plt.savefig('output.png')

UPDATE NOTE: size was changed to height.

Answer 3

Some of the above solutions did not work for me. The .fig attribute was not found when I tried that and I was unable to use .savefig() directly. However, what did work was:

sns_plot.figure.savefig("output.png")

I am a newer Python user, so I do not know if this is due to an update. I wanted to mention it in case anybody else runs into the same issues as I did.

Answer 4

Its also possible to just create a matplotlib figure object and then use plt.savefig(...):

from matplotlib import pyplot as plt
import seaborn as sns
import pandas as pd

df = sns.load_dataset('iris')
plt.figure() # Push new figure on stack
sns_plot = sns.pairplot(df, hue='species', size=2.5)
plt.savefig('output.png') # Save that figure