Plotting images side by side using matplotlib

You are plotting all your images on one axis. What you want ist to get a handle for each axis individually and plot your images there. Like so:

fig = plt.figure()
ax1 = fig.add_subplot(2,2,1)
ax1.imshow(...)
ax2 = fig.add_subplot(2,2,2)
ax2.imshow(...)
ax3 = fig.add_subplot(2,2,3)
ax3.imshow(...)
ax4 = fig.add_subplot(2,2,4)
ax4.imshow(...)

For more info have a look here: http://matplotlib.org/examples/pylab_examples/subplots_demo.html

For complex layouts, you should consider using gridspec: http://matplotlib.org/users/gridspec.html

One thing that I found quite helpful to use to print all images :

_, axs = plt.subplots(n_row, n_col, figsize=(12, 12))
axs = axs.flatten()
for img, ax in zip(imgs, axs):
    ax.imshow(img)
plt.show()

The problem you face is that you try to assign the return of imshow (which is an matplotlib.image.AxesImage to an existing axes object.

The correct way of plotting image data to the different axes in axarr would be

f, axarr = plt.subplots(2,2)
axarr[0,0].imshow(image_datas[0])
axarr[0,1].imshow(image_datas[1])
axarr[1,0].imshow(image_datas[2])
axarr[1,1].imshow(image_datas[3])

The concept is the same for all subplots, and in most cases the axes instance provide the same methods than the pyplot (plt) interface. E.g. if ax is one of your subplot axes, for plotting a normal line plot you'd use ax.plot(..) instead of plt.plot(). This can actually be found exactly in the source from the page you link to.