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

Answer 1

Perhaps just clear the axis, for example:

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

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

Answer 2

I'm a beginner though,off the inline mode when you don't want to see the output in your notebook by:

%matplotlib auto

or:

%matplotlib

to use it back:

%matplotlib inline

more better solution would be to use:

plt.ioff()

which says inline mode off.

hope it helps.

Answer 3

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

Answer 4

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

plt.ioff()

Answer 5

Building off @importanceofbeingernest's answer, one may call some function in a loop, and at each iteration, want to render a plot. However, between the each plot, you may want to render additional stuff.

Concretely:

1. Iterate a list of IDs
2. Call a function so a plot is rendered for each "ID"
3. Between each plot, render some markdown

---

# <cell begins>
def render(id):
   fig, axes = plt.subplots(2, 1)
   plt.suptitle(f'Metrics for {id}')

   df.ColA.plot.bar(ax=axes[0])
   df.ColB.plot.bar(ax=axes[1])

   return fig

# <cell ends>

# -------------------------------------

# <cell begins>
%matplotlib agg

for id in df.ID.value_counts().index:
   fig = render(id)

   display(fig)
   display(Markdown('---'))

# <cell ends>

Answer 6

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.

Answer 7

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