Removing Axes, Legends, and White Padding in Matplotlib

In this article, we address the issue of removing axes, legends, and white padding when saving an image generated using Matplotlib.

Removing Axes

The original code snippet successfully removes the axes of the figure by hiding the x-axis and y-axis using fig.axes.get_xaxis().set_visible(False) and fig.axes.get_yaxis().set_visible(False), respectively. However, this technique may not entirely resolve the issue of white padding and frame around the image.

Removing White Padding

To remove the white padding, we can use the axis('off') method, which hides all axes and borders, leaving only the image itself. However, this method may still leave a small amount of white space around the image.

To further eliminate the white padding, we can add bbox_inches='tight' to the savefig command. This will crop the saved image to the exact size of the image data, leaving no white space around the borders.

Updated Code Snippet

def make_image(inputname,outputname):
    data = mpimg.imread(inputname)[:,:,0]
    fig = plt.imshow(data)
    fig.set_cmap('hot')
    plt.axis('off')
    plt.savefig(outputname, bbox_inches='tight')

By using axis('off') and bbox_inches='tight' together, we can effectively remove all axes, legends, and white padding, leaving only the desired image.