Display multiple images in one IPython Notebook cell?

If I have multiple images (loaded as NumPy arrays) how can I display the in one IPython Notebook cell?

I know that I can use plt.imshow(ima) to display one image… but I want to show more than one at a time.

I have tried:

 for ima in images:
     display(Image(ima))

But I just get a broken image link:

Solution 1:

Short answer:

call plt.figure() to create new figures if you want more than one in a cell:

for ima in images:
    plt.figure()
    plt.imshow(ima)

But to clarify the confusion with Image:

IPython.display.Image is for displaying Image files, not array data. If you want to display numpy arrays with Image, you have to convert them to a file-format first (easiest with PIL):

from io import BytesIO
import PIL
from IPython.display import display, Image

def display_img_array(ima):
    im = PIL.Image.fromarray(ima)
    bio = BytesIO()
    im.save(bio, format='png')
    display(Image(bio.getvalue(), format='png'))

for ima in images:
    display_img_array(ima)

A notebook illustrating both approaches.

Solution 2:

This is easier and works:

from IPython.display import Image
from IPython.display import display
x = Image(filename='1.png') 
y = Image(filename='2.png') 
display(x, y)

Solution 3:

Horizontal layout

Short answer

plt.figure(figsize=(20,10))
columns = 5
for i, image in enumerate(images):
    plt.subplot(len(images) / columns + 1, columns, i + 1)
    plt.imshow(image)

Long answer

import glob
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import matplotlib.image as mpimg
%matplotlib inline

images = []
for img_path in glob.glob('images/*.jpg'):
    images.append(mpimg.imread(img_path))

plt.figure(figsize=(20,10))
columns = 5
for i, image in enumerate(images):
    plt.subplot(len(images) / columns + 1, columns, i + 1)
    plt.imshow(image)