Share Y Axis across multiple Figures in Matplotlib

Question

I have figures that require very high resolution, therefore I cannot use subplots with multiple axis (results in ValueError: Image size of 102400x6400 pixels is too large). However, I still want all the figures to share the y axis, as one would do with plt.subplots(sharey=True). In this case I am not concerned about only displaying one y axis, as would be the result with subplots. Rather, I want the ticks to be at the same position and the distances between them be the same.

Answer 1

Of course you can simply set the same limits to both axes manually. And in fact that would be the solution I would recommend when producing high quality output.

ax1.set_xlim(xmin, xmax)
ax2.set_xlim(xmin, xmax)

Calculating xmin and xmax can be automated depending on the use case.

If a completely automated solution is desired or if true sharing is desired, you can share axes after their creation.

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

x1 = np.arange(6)
y1 = np.tile([1,2],3) 

x2 = np.arange(5,11)
y2 = np.tile([6,8],3) 


fig1, ax1 = plt.subplots()
fig2, ax2 = plt.subplots()

ax1.plot(x1,y1)
ax2.plot(x2,y2)

ax1.get_shared_x_axes().join(ax1, ax2)
ax1.get_shared_y_axes().join(ax1, ax2)

ax2.autoscale()


plt.show()