How to set legend outside three-dimensional axes in matplotlib?

Question

I am working with a basic 3D scatterplot in matplotlib. A simple example of the code is the following:

from mpl_toolkits.mplot3d import Axes3D 
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

XX = np.array([[1,6,7,3,2],[8,11,7,5,12],[2,7,1,30,12],[15,3,17,2,1]])

fig = plt.figure()
ax = plt.axes(projection='3d')

xs = XX[indx, 0]
ys = XX[indx, 1]
zs = XX[indx, 2]


for i in range(11):
    ax.scatter3D(xs, ys, zs, c='b', marker='o', label='item'+str(i), s=100.5, alpha=1)

ax.set_xlabel('X Label')
ax.set_ylabel('Y Label')
ax.set_zlabel('Z Label')

plt.title('Number of Components = 3')
ax.legend(loc='center left', bbox_to_anchor=(1, 0.5), fontsize=7)
plt.tight_layout()
plt.show()

Following is my output plot:

In my output plot, the legend overlaps with the label for Z-axis. I want to place the legend outside of the three dimensional axis box, preferably to the right of the plot (i.e. to the right of ZLabel) such that it doesn’t overlap with anything. How can I do that?

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 24 '19 at 20:53

The general strategy to place the legend out of the plot is shown in How to put the legend out of the plot

Here you may want to leave some more space to the right and move the legend even further to the right

fig.tight_layout()
fig.subplots_adjust(right=0.8)
ax.legend(loc='center left', bbox_to_anchor=(1.07, 0.5), fontsize=7)

How to set legend outside three-dimensional axes in matplotlib?

1 Answers1