Removing white space around a saved image in matplotlib

You can remove the white space padding by setting bbox_inches="tight" in savefig:

plt.savefig("test.png",bbox_inches='tight')

You'll have to put the argument to bbox_inches as a string, perhaps this is why it didn't work earlier for you.

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Possible duplicates:

Matplotlib plots: removing axis, legends and white spaces

How to set the margins for a matplotlib figure?

Reduce left and right margins in matplotlib plot

I cannot claim I know exactly why or how my “solution” works, but this is what I had to do when I wanted to plot the outline of a couple of aerofoil sections — without white margins — to a PDF file. (Note that I used matplotlib inside an IPython notebook, with the -pylab flag.)

plt.gca().set_axis_off()
plt.subplots_adjust(top = 1, bottom = 0, right = 1, left = 0, 
            hspace = 0, wspace = 0)
plt.margins(0,0)
plt.gca().xaxis.set_major_locator(plt.NullLocator())
plt.gca().yaxis.set_major_locator(plt.NullLocator())
plt.savefig("filename.pdf", bbox_inches = 'tight',
    pad_inches = 0)

I have tried to deactivate different parts of this, but this always lead to a white margin somewhere. You may even have modify this to keep fat lines near the limits of the figure from being shaved by the lack of margins.

After trying the above answers with no success (and a slew of other stack posts) what finally worked for me was just

plt.gca().set_axis_off()
plt.subplots_adjust(top = 1, bottom = 0, right = 1, left = 0, 
            hspace = 0, wspace = 0)
plt.margins(0,0)
plt.savefig("myfig.pdf")

Importantly this does not include the bbox or padding arguments.