Why is ggsave not saving my plot to my computer?

Question

Hi I'm trying to save high quality (300 dpi) images using RStudio but no luck so far. I've looked around a lot on the internet but no answer seems to work. Even when I run the code below, no file shows up on my computer. Any help is appreciated!

install.packages("gapminder")
library(gapminder)
data("gapminder")

attach(gapminder)

plot(lifeExp ~ log(gdpPercap))
ggsave("filename.png",dpi = 300)

`ggsave` is meant to work with `ggplot` objets. The `plot()` function uses base R graphics and is not related so `ggplot` at all. So do you want to save base graphics? If so, see this duplicate: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7144118/how-to-save-a-plot-as-image-on-the-disk. Otherwise you'll actually need to create your plot using the `ggplot` function and syntax in order to use `ggsave`. — MrFlick, Feb 24 '22 at 04:19

Ruam Pimentel · Accepted Answer · 2022-02-24T04:32:01.833

It works fine if you use ggplot() from ggplot2 instead of plot()

Packages and data

library(ggplot2)
library(gapminder)

data("gapminder")
attach(gapminder)

Solution

ggplot(gapminder,
       aes(x =  log(gdpPercap), y = lifeExp)) +
  geom_point()

ggsave("filename.png",dpi = 300)

Here are some tweaks you came make to make it more similar to plot() appearance:

ggplot(gapminder,
       aes(x =  log(gdpPercap), y = lifeExp)) +
  geom_point(shape = 1) +
  theme_linedraw()

output from last code

Why is ggsave not saving my plot to my computer?

1 Answers1

Solution