prevent plot from showing in jupyter notebook

Question

How can I prevent a specific plot to be shown in Jupyter notebook? I have several plots in a notebook but I want a subset of them to be saved to a file and not shown on the notebook as this slows considerably.

A minimal working example for a Jupyter notebook is:

%matplotlib inline 
from numpy.random import randn
from matplotlib.pyplot import plot, figure
a=randn(3)
b=randn(3)
for i in range(10):
    fig=figure()
    plot(b)
    fname='s%03d.png'%i
    fig.savefig(fname)
    if(i%5==0):
        figure()
        plot(a)

As you can see I have two types of plots, a and b. I want a's to be plotted and shown and I don't want the b plots to be shown, I just want them them to be saved in a file. Hopefully this will speed things a bit and won't pollute my notebook with figures I don't need to see.

Thank you for your time

Solution 1

Perhaps just clear the axis, for example:

fig= plt.figure()
plt.plot(range(10))
fig.savefig("save_file_name.pdf")
plt.close()

will not plot the output in inline mode. I can't work out if is really clearing the data though.

Solution 2

I was able to prevent my figures from displaying by turning interactive mode off using the function

plt.ioff()

Solution 3

To prevent any output from a jupyter notebook cell you may start the cell with

%%capture

This might be usefull in cases all other methods shown here fail.

Solution 4

From IPython 6.0 on, there is another option to turn the inline output off (temporarily or persistently). This has been introduced in this pull request.

You would use the "agg" backend to not show any inline output.

%matplotlib agg

It seems though that if you had activated the inline backend first, this needs to be called twice to take effect.

%matplotlib agg
%matplotlib agg

Here is how it would look in action

Solution 5

On Jupyter 6.0, I use the following snippet to selectively not display the matplot lib figures.

import matplotlib as mpl

...

backend_ =  mpl.get_backend() 
mpl.use("Agg")  # Prevent showing stuff

# Your code

mpl.use(backend_) # Reset backend

View more solutions

Comments

[sodd]

possible duplicate of Plot an IPython Notebook figure inline with fig.show()?

[gota]

honestly, I didn't understand the answers on that question

[gota]

It does not plot the output but returns <matplotlib.figure.Figure at 0x31c0d50> how can I prevent this from happening?

[Greg]

I have updated the answer, using plt.close() doesn't output this. I think it is some kind of reference to the figure left over but I'm not sure.

[Aron Ahmadia]

This is subtle, but changing plt.close() to plt.close(); should do the trick. This worked for me on IPython 2 and matplotlib 1.3.1

[travc]

Very helpful if you're using mpld3 (or something similar) for making interactive online figures and %matplotlib notebook to preview static figures.

[gota]

@Brian Why should this be the new accepted answer? How is this method better than the previous? Is it more general?

[Sunday]

In my case, using notebook mode, this method still creates some empty space in the output cell, which clutters my notebook when doing multiple plots at once. I wrapped my plotting routine in a pair of plt.ioff() and plt.ion() and now there is no more clutter.

[Prasoon Varshney]

Do you know why agg needs to be called twice if inline was already called?

[user202729]

Documentation link: matplotlib.pyplot.close — Matplotlib 3.2.1 documentation

[Tendero]

This is the best answer by far.