How to change figuresize using seaborn factorplot

Note added in 2019: In modern seaborn versions the size argument has been renamed to height.

To be a little more concrete:

%matplotlib inline

import seaborn as sns

exercise = sns.load_dataset("exercise")

# Defaults are size=5, aspect=1
sns.factorplot("kind", "pulse", "diet", exercise, kind="point", size=2, aspect=1)
sns.factorplot("kind", "pulse", "diet", exercise, kind="point", size=4, aspect=1)
sns.factorplot("kind", "pulse", "diet", exercise, kind="point", size=4, aspect=2)

You want to pass in the arguments 'size' or 'aspect' to the sns.factorplot() when constructing your plot.

Size will change the height, while maintaining the aspect ratio (so it will also also get wider if only size is changed.)

Aspect will change the width while keeping the height constant.

The above code should be able to be run locally in an ipython notebook.

Plot sizes are reduced in these examples to show the effects, and because the plots from the above code were fairly large when saved as png's. This also shows that size/aspect includes the legend in the margin.

size=2, aspect=1

size=2, aspect=1

size=4, aspect=1

size=4, aspect=1

size=4, aspect=2

size=4, aspect=2

Also, all other useful parameters/arguments and defaults for this plotting function can be viewed with once the 'sns' module is loaded:

help(sns.factorplot)

The size of the figure is controlled by the size and aspect arguments to factorplot. They correspond to the size of each facet ("size" really means "height" and then size * aspect gives the width), so if you are aiming for a particularl size for the whole figure you'll need to work backwards from there.


mpl.rc is stored in a global dictionary (see http://matplotlib.org/users/customizing.html). So, if you only want to change the size of one figure (locally), it will do the trick:

plt.figure(figsize=(45,10))
sns.factorplot(...)

It worked for me using matplotlib-1.4.3 and seaborn-0.5.1