113

How can I prevent a specific plot to be shown in Jupyter notebook? I have several plots in a notebook but I want a subset of them to be saved to a file and not shown on the notebook as this slows considerably.

A minimal working example for a Jupyter notebook is:

%matplotlib inline 
from numpy.random import randn
from matplotlib.pyplot import plot, figure
a=randn(3)
b=randn(3)
for i in range(10):
    fig=figure()
    plot(b)
    fname='s%03d.png'%i
    fig.savefig(fname)
    if(i%5==0):
        figure()
        plot(a)

As you can see I have two types of plots, a and b. I want a's to be plotted and shown and I don't want the b plots to be shown, I just want them them to be saved in a file. Hopefully this will speed things a bit and won't pollute my notebook with figures I don't need to see.

Thank you for your time

gota
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  • possible duplicate of [Plot an IPython Notebook figure inline with fig.show()?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15480379/plot-an-ipython-notebook-figure-inline-with-fig-show) – sodd Sep 10 '13 at 11:39
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    honestly, I didn't understand the answers on that question – gota Sep 11 '13 at 10:30
  • For more info and similar issue, look at this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15713279/calling-pylab-savefig-without-display-in-ipython – MojiProg May 11 '23 at 23:01

7 Answers7

147

Perhaps just clear the axis, for example:

fig = plt.figure()
plt.plot(range(10))
fig.savefig("save_file_name.pdf")
plt.close()

This will not plot the output in inline mode. I can't work out if it is really clearing the data though.

Archie
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Greg
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  • It does not plot the output but returns how can I prevent this from happening? – gota Sep 11 '13 at 11:22
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    I have updated the answer, using `plt.close()` doesn't output this. I think it is some kind of reference to the figure left over but I'm not sure. – Greg Sep 11 '13 at 14:49
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    This is subtle, but changing `plt.close()` to `plt.close();` should do the trick. This worked for me on IPython 2 and matplotlib 1.3.1 – Aron Ahmadia Apr 28 '14 at 17:52
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    In my case, using `notebook` mode, this method still creates some empty space in the output cell, which clutters my notebook when doing multiple plots at once. I wrapped my plotting routine in a pair of `plt.ioff()` and `plt.ion()` and now there is no more clutter. – Sunday Jan 29 '19 at 11:27
  • Documentation link: [matplotlib.pyplot.close — Matplotlib 3.2.1 documentation](https://matplotlib.org/3.2.1/api/_as_gen/matplotlib.pyplot.close.html) – user202729 Jan 11 '21 at 14:09
56

I was able to prevent my figures from displaying by turning interactive mode off using the function

plt.ioff()

Dr.PP
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    Very helpful if you're using mpld3 (or something similar) for making interactive online figures and `%matplotlib notebook` to preview static figures. – travc May 11 '17 at 22:26
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    @Brian Why should this be the new accepted answer? How is this method better than the previous? Is it more general? – gota Oct 09 '17 at 11:56
44

To prevent any output from a jupyter notebook cell you may start the cell with

%%capture

This might be usefull in cases all other methods shown here fail.

ImportanceOfBeingErnest
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20

From IPython 6.0 on, there is another option to turn the inline output off (temporarily or persistently). This has been introduced in this pull request.

You would use the "agg" backend to not show any inline output.

%matplotlib agg

It seems though that if you had activated the inline backend first, this needs to be called twice to take effect.

%matplotlib agg
%matplotlib agg

Here is how it would look in action

ImportanceOfBeingErnest
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10

On Jupyter 6.0, I use the following snippet to selectively not display the matplot lib figures. 

import matplotlib as mpl

...

backend_ =  mpl.get_backend() 
mpl.use("Agg")  # Prevent showing stuff

# Your code

mpl.use(backend_) # Reset backend
Asanga
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9

I'm a beginner though,off the inline mode when you don't want to see the output in your notebook by:

%matplotlib auto

or:

%matplotlib

to use it back:

%matplotlib inline

more better solution would be to use:

plt.ioff()

which says inline mode off.

hope it helps.

Deepak Joshi
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0

Building off @importanceofbeingernest's answer, one may call some function in a loop, and at each iteration, want to render a plot. However, between the each plot, you may want to render additional stuff.

Concretely:

  1. Iterate a list of IDs
  2. Call a function so a plot is rendered for each "ID"
  3. Between each plot, render some markdown
# <cell begins>
def render(id):
   fig, axes = plt.subplots(2, 1)
   plt.suptitle(f'Metrics for {id}')

   df.ColA.plot.bar(ax=axes[0])
   df.ColB.plot.bar(ax=axes[1])

   return fig

# <cell ends>

# -------------------------------------

# <cell begins>
%matplotlib agg

for id in df.ID.value_counts().index:
   fig = render(id)

   display(fig)
   display(Markdown('---'))

# <cell ends>
rodrigo-silveira
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