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pythonmatplotlibcolorbarimshow

Positioning the colorbar

I have a matplotlib plot with a colorbar attached. I want to position the colorbar so that it is horizontal, and underneath my plot.

I have almost done this via the following:

plt.colorbar(orientation="horizontal",fraction=0.07,anchor=(1.0,0.0))

But the colorbar is still overlapping with the plot slightly (and the labels of the x axis). I want to move the colorbar further down, but I can't figure out how to do it.

Solution

  • Edit: Updated for matplotlib version >= 3.

    Three great ways to do this have already been shared in this answer.

    The matplotlib documentation advises to use inset_locator. This would work as follows:

    import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from mpl_toolkits.axes_grid1.inset_locator import inset_axes
import numpy as np

rng = np.random.default_rng(1)

fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(4,4))
im = ax.imshow(rng.random((11, 16)))
ax.set_xlabel("x label")

axins = inset_axes(ax,
                    width="100%",  
                    height="5%",
                    loc='lower center',
                    borderpad=-5
                   )
fig.colorbar(im, cax=axins, orientation="horizontal")

    code output