matplotlib // space between subplots

Question

I want to plot images (in the 1st row) along with some diagrams (the 2nd and 3rd rows) using subplots from matplotlib.pyplot . However, imshow fucntion adds some additional white space around images I can't get rid of. Here is my code and the plot I'm getting:

rcParams['figure.figsize'] = (16, 14)
_, axes = plt.subplots(3, 3)

axes[0][0].imshow(image)
axes[0][0].set_title('title')
axes[0][0].set_xticklabels(list())
axes[0][0].set_yticklabels(list())
axes[0][0].grid(False)

axes[0][1].imshow(image)
axes[0][1].set_title('title')
axes[0][1].set_xticklabels(list())
axes[0][1].set_yticklabels(list())
axes[0][1].grid(False)

axes[0][2].imshow(image)
axes[0][2].set_title('title')
axes[0][2].set_xticklabels(list())
axes[0][2].set_yticklabels(list())
axes[0][2].grid(False)

plt.savefig(file_name, bbox_inches='tight')

in the plot below you can clearly see that there is significantly more space between the 1st and 2nd rows:

I would like to have an equal space between all subplots. What would be the easiest way to do this?

Thanks in advance for any advice!

Best, Alexey

Answer 1

This is because imshow is showing the image with square pixels. If the image as a ratio of eg 16:9, the subplot will be reshaped to fit the image size. They will therefore have a different shape from the other subplots (see the imshow documentation for more info).

From here, you have two solutions:

• decrease the figure height in order to reduce manually the vertical space between subplots
• prevent imshow to resize the axes based on the images. For this you can set the aspect ratio to automatic aspect="auto" , and the image will fit the existing axes