How to combine several matplotlib figures into one figure?

Question

I have several matplotlib Figure-objects that I want to combine to one large figure by placing them next to another.

How to get them into one figure?
How to make them the same height?

Note that I cannot change the way the individual figures are created. I can just use the resulting Figure objects.

Right, at least not in the way one typically would to arrange several plots in one figure. — Se Norm, Mar 20 '14 at 01:59
WXAgg. How does that matter? As a final output I will probably prefer a high res PNG or perhaps a PDF. — Se Norm, Mar 20 '14 at 03:51
You can save figures in PNG files, and combine PNGs into one big PNG image. — HYRY, Mar 20 '14 at 08:08
That's what I'm doing right now using PIL. I was hoping for a more feature rich way, like the subplot grids available in matplotlib. — Se Norm, Mar 21 '14 at 04:30

score 6 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 11:58

It seems there is no (reliable - see bottom) matplotlib way of doing this, so one is stuck with using image processing tools on the figure-output. I'm using PNGs and PIL for that. Another possibility is using SVGs like here: http://neuroscience.telenczuk.pl/?p=331

That is a related question: matplotlib: can I create AxesSubplot objects, then add them to a Figure instance?

Here is a way that seemed to work in 2012, proposed by Joe Kington:

Axes deliberately aren't supposed to be shared between different figures now. As a workaround, you could do this fig2._axstack.add(fig2._make_key(a), a), but it's hackish and likely to change in the future. It seems to work properly, but it may break some things.

I haven't tried if it still works.

How to combine several matplotlib figures into one figure?

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