Is there a way to save a Matplotlib figure such that it can be re-opened and have typical interaction restored? (Like the .fig format in MATLAB?)

I find myself running the same scripts many times to generate these interactive figures. Or I’m sending my colleagues multiple static PNG files to show different aspects of a plot. I’d rather send the figure object and have them interact with it themselves.

This would be a great feature, but AFAIK it isn’t implemented in Matplotlib and likely would be difficult to implement yourself due to the way figures are stored.

I’d suggest either (a) separate processing the data from generating the figure (which saves data with a unique name) and write a figure generating script (loading a specified file of the saved data) and editing as you see fit or (b) save as PDF/SVG/PostScript format and edit in some fancy figure editor like Adobe Illustrator (or Inkscape).

EDIT post Fall 2012: As others pointed out below (though mentioning here as this is the accepted answer), Matplotlib since version 1.2 allowed you to pickle figures. As the release notes state, it is an experimental feature and does not support saving a figure in one matplotlib version and opening in another. It’s also generally unsecure to restore a pickle from an untrusted source.

For sharing/later editing plots (that require significant data processing first and may need to be tweaked months later say during peer review for a scientific publication), I still recommend the workflow of (1) have a data processing script that before generating a plot saves the processed data (that goes into your plot) into a file, and (2) have a separate plot generation script (that you adjust as necessary) to recreate the plot. This way for each plot you can quickly run a script and re-generate it (and quickly copy over your plot settings with new data). That said, pickling a figure could be convenient for short term/interactive/exploratory data analysis.

I just found out how to do this. The “experimental pickle support” mentioned by @pelson works quite well.

Try this:

# Plot something
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
fig,ax = plt.subplots()
ax.plot([1,2,3],[10,-10,30])

After your interactive tweaking, save the figure object as a binary file:

import pickle
pickle.dump(fig, open('FigureObject.fig.pickle', 'wb')) # This is for Python 3 - py2 may need `file` instead of `open`

Later, open the figure and the tweaks should be saved and GUI interactivity should be present:

import pickle
figx = pickle.load(open('FigureObject.fig.pickle', 'rb'))

figx.show() # Show the figure, edit it, etc.!

You can even extract the data from the plots:

data = figx.axes[0].lines[0].get_data()

(It works for lines, pcolor & imshow – pcolormesh works with some tricks to reconstruct the flattened data.)

I got the excellent tip from Saving Matplotlib Figures Using Pickle.

As of Matplotlib 1.2, we now have experimental pickle support. Give that a go and see if it works well for your case. If you have any issues, please let us know on the Matplotlib mailing list or by opening an issue on github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib.

Why not just send the Python script? MATLAB’s .fig files require the recipient to have MATLAB to display them, so that’s about equivalent to sending a Python script that requires Matplotlib to display.

Alternatively (disclaimer: I haven’t tried this yet), you could try pickling the figure:

import pickle
output = open('interactive figure.pickle', 'wb')
pickle.dump(gcf(), output)
output.close()

Good question. Here is the doc text from pylab.save:

pylab no longer provides a save function, though the old pylab function is still available as matplotlib.mlab.save (you can still refer to it in pylab as “mlab.save”). However, for plain text files, we recommend numpy.savetxt. For saving numpy arrays, we recommend numpy.save, and its analog numpy.load, which are available in pylab as np.save and np.load.

I figured out a relatively simple way (yet slightly unconventional) to save my matplotlib figures. It works like this:

import libscript

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

t = np.arange(0.0, 2.0, 0.01)
s = 1 + np.sin(2*np.pi*t)

#<plot>
plt.plot(t, s)
plt.xlabel('time (s)')
plt.ylabel('voltage (mV)')
plt.title('About as simple as it gets, folks')
plt.grid(True)
plt.show()
#</plot>

save_plot(fileName='plot_01.py',obj=sys.argv[0],sel='plot',ctx=libscript.get_ctx(ctx_global=globals(),ctx_local=locals()))

with function save_plot defined like this (simple version to understand the logic):

def save_plot(fileName='',obj=None,sel='',ctx={}):
    """
    Save of matplolib plot to a stand alone python script containing all the data and configuration instructions to regenerate the interactive matplotlib figure.

    Parameters
    ----------
    fileName : [string] Path of the python script file to be created.
    obj : [object] Function or python object containing the lines of code to create and configure the plot to be saved.
    sel : [string] Name of the tag enclosing the lines of code to create and configure the plot to be saved.
    ctx : [dict] Dictionary containing the execution context. Values for variables not defined in the lines of code for the plot will be fetched from the context.

    Returns
    -------
    Return ``'done'`` once the plot has been saved to a python script file. This file contains all the input data and configuration to re-create the original interactive matplotlib figure.
    """
    import os
    import libscript

    N_indent=4

    src=libscript.get_src(obj=obj,sel=sel)
    src=libscript.prepend_ctx(src=src,ctx=ctx,debug=False)
    src='\n'.join([' '*N_indent+line for line in src.split('\n')])

    if(os.path.isfile(fileName)): os.remove(fileName)
    with open(fileName,'w') as f:
        f.write('import sys\n')
        f.write('sys.dont_write_bytecode=True\n')
        f.write('def main():\n')
        f.write(src+'\n')

        f.write('if(__name__=="__main__"):\n')
        f.write(' '*N_indent+'main()\n')

return 'done'

or defining function save_plot like this (better version using zip compression to produce lighter figure files):

def save_plot(fileName='',obj=None,sel='',ctx={}):

    import os
    import json
    import zlib
    import base64
    import libscript

    N_indent=4
    level=9#0 to 9, default: 6
    src=libscript.get_src(obj=obj,sel=sel)
    obj=libscript.load_obj(src=src,ctx=ctx,debug=False)
    bin=base64.b64encode(zlib.compress(json.dumps(obj),level))

    if(os.path.isfile(fileName)): os.remove(fileName)
    with open(fileName,'w') as f:
        f.write('import sys\n')
        f.write('sys.dont_write_bytecode=True\n')
        f.write('def main():\n')
        f.write(' '*N_indent+'import base64\n')
        f.write(' '*N_indent+'import zlib\n')
        f.write(' '*N_indent+'import json\n')
        f.write(' '*N_indent+'import libscript\n')
        f.write(' '*N_indent+'bin="'+str(bin)+'"\n')
        f.write(' '*N_indent+'obj=json.loads(zlib.decompress(base64.b64decode(bin)))\n')
        f.write(' '*N_indent+'libscript.exec_obj(obj=obj,tempfile=False)\n')

        f.write('if(__name__=="__main__"):\n')
        f.write(' '*N_indent+'main()\n')

return 'done'

This makes use a module libscript of my own, which mostly relies on modules inspect and ast. I can try to share it on Github if interest is expressed (it would first require some cleanup and me to get started with Github).

The idea behind this save_plot function and libscript module is to fetch the python instructions that create the figure (using module inspect), analyze them (using module ast) to extract all variables, functions and modules import it relies on, extract these from the execution context and serialize them as python instructions (code for variables will be like t=[0.0,2.0,0.01] … and code for modules will be like import matplotlib.pyplot as plt …) prepended to the figure instructions. The resulting python instructions are saved as a python script whose execution will re-build the original matplotlib figure.

As you can imagine, this works well for most (if not all) matplotlib figures.