Save multiple ggplots using a for loop

Here is a fully reproducible example of creating ggplots in a loop.

# Plot separate ggplot figures in a loop.
library(ggplot2)

# Make list of variable names to loop over.
var_list = combn(names(iris)[1:3], 2, simplify=FALSE)

# Make plots.
plot_list = list()
for (i in 1:3) {
    p = ggplot(iris, aes_string(x=var_list[[i]][1], y=var_list[[i]][2])) +
        geom_point(size=3, aes(colour=Species))
    plot_list[[i]] = p
}

# Save plots to tiff. Makes a separate file for each plot.
for (i in 1:3) {
    file_name = paste("iris_plot_", i, ".tiff", sep="")
    tiff(file_name)
    print(plot_list[[i]])
    dev.off()
}

# Another option: create pdf where each page is a separate plot.
pdf("plots.pdf")
for (i in 1:3) {
    print(plot_list[[i]])
}
dev.off()

enter image description here


You can also use the ggsave function from ggplot2 library.

library(ggplot2)
data("iris")

# list of values to loop over
  uniq_species = unique(iris$Species)


# Loop

for (i in uniq_species) {

  temp_plot = ggplot(data= subset(iris, Species == i)) + 
                  geom_point(size=3, aes(x=Petal.Length, y=Petal.Width )) +
                  ggtitle(i)

  ggsave(temp_plot, file=paste0("plot_", i,".png"), width = 14, height = 10, units = "cm")
}