Error in grDevices::png

Question

quick.hist<-ggplot(ufo.us, aes(X=DateOccured))+geom_histogram()+scale_x_date()
ggsave(plot=quick.hist,filename= "../images/hist.png",height=6, width=8)

file format is simple:

it contains 2 dates,city,state,duration

I am getting error during plot:that is during ggsave()

Error in grDevices::png(..., width = width, height = height, res = dpi,  
  unable to start png() device

In addition: Warning messages:

 In grDevices::png(..., width = width, height = height, res = dpi,  
  unable to open file '../images/hist.png' for writing

 In grDevices::png(..., width = width, height = height, res = dpi,  
  opening device failed

I am very new to R and getting error. I have just started copying the book code for histogram chart, first chapter from book machine learning hacker perspective.

try another file format, e.g. pdf, and a simpler file path e.g. "hist.pdf" — baptiste, Apr 30 '14 at 12:27
@baptiste - this is almost certainly a directory permissions (or nonexistent directory) problem, not png vs pdf. — Carl Witthoft, Apr 30 '14 at 13:07
@Carl Witthoft I'm having the same issue. And it seems to be **png vs pdf**. Pdf save works ok — ikashnitsky, Feb 26 '16 at 15:10
@Ilya if you can repeat the issue, it's probably worth sending your example, along with your operating system, R-version, etc. to the maintainer of `grDevices` — Carl Witthoft, Feb 26 '16 at 17:07
@Carl Witthoft I will. In a [related post](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4270349/ggsave-png-error-with-larger-size) I found how to get around the problem. The devil is in `dpi` parameter of `ggsave`. The default is 300. Empirically I chose 192, as 256 produced the similar error. — ikashnitsky, Feb 26 '16 at 19:36

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 09 '16 at 16:18

I had the same problem recently. It occurs when compiling R from source without having the appropriate libraries installed. So R does not know how to talk to the png device at all.

In order to fix this problem just install the following packages (e.g. using Ubuntu16.04)

sudo apt install libcairo2-dev libjpeg9-dev

and run the ./configure again.

If those libraries were sufficient both PNG and cairo should be listed as Additional capabilities at the end of the configuration. So if none of them shows up using

cat config.log | grep skipped

you are good to go.

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 02 '18 at 18:27

2

I had the same issue. In my case, my working directory (check getwd) was not the right one so the filepath didn't make sense.

answered Oct 02 '18 at 18:27

user3507584

3,246
5
42
66

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 15 '21 at 19:05

I had this same problem as the OP. It appeared to be an error from ggsave() but I traced it back to a ggarrange() call. I was hitting my limit of open devices (~64) and needed to call dev.off() following each ggarrange() call. This post was helpful: Too many open devices r

Error in grDevices::png

3 Answers3