How to change the figure size of a seaborn axes or figure level plot

How do I change the size of my image so it's suitable for printing?

For example, I'd like to use to A4 paper, whose dimensions are 11.7 inches by 8.27 inches in landscape orientation.


You can also set figure size by passing dictionary to rc parameter with key 'figure.figsize' in seaborn set method:

import seaborn as sns

sns.set(rc={'figure.figsize':(11.7,8.27)})

Other alternative may be to use figure.figsize of rcParams to set figure size as below:

from matplotlib import rcParams

# figure size in inches
rcParams['figure.figsize'] = 11.7,8.27

More details can be found in matplotlib documentation


You need to create the matplotlib Figure and Axes objects ahead of time, specifying how big the figure is:

from matplotlib import pyplot
import seaborn

import mylib

a4_dims = (11.7, 8.27)
df = mylib.load_data()
fig, ax = pyplot.subplots(figsize=a4_dims)
seaborn.violinplot(ax=ax, data=df, **violin_options)

Note that if you are trying to pass to a "figure level" method in seaborn (for example lmplot, catplot / factorplot, jointplot) you can and should specify this within the arguments using height and aspect.

sns.catplot(data=df, x='xvar', y='yvar', 
    hue='hue_bar', height=8.27, aspect=11.7/8.27)

See https://github.com/mwaskom/seaborn/issues/488 and Plotting with seaborn using the matplotlib object-oriented interface for more details on the fact that figure level methods do not obey axes specifications.


You can set the context to be poster or manually set fig_size.

import numpy as np
import seaborn as sns
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

np.random.seed(0)
n, p = 40, 8
d = np.random.normal(0, 2, (n, p))
d += np.log(np.arange(1, p + 1)) * -5 + 10


# plot
sns.set_style('ticks')
fig, ax = plt.subplots()
# the size of A4 paper
fig.set_size_inches(11.7, 8.27)
sns.violinplot(data=d, inner="points", ax=ax)    
sns.despine()

fig.savefig('example.png')

enter image description here


first import matplotlib and use it to set the size of the figure

from matplotlib import pyplot as plt
import seaborn as sns

plt.figure(figsize=(15,8))
ax = sns.barplot(x="Word", y="Frequency", data=boxdata)