How to Save Plots as Animated GIFs

This guide shows how to save an hvPlot plot as an animated GIF, with one frame per value of a groupby column. Only the Matplotlib backend can write GIFs, and it needs Pillow installed.

Create an animation

Load the Matplotlib backend and plot with groupby and dynamic=False. The result is a HoloViews HoloMap holding one frame per group, instead of a plot with a widget. Fix the axis limits with xlim and ylim so the axes do not change from frame to frame:

import hvplot.pandas  # noqa
import hvplot.xarray  # noqa

hvplot.extension('matplotlib')

stocks = hvplot.sampledata.stocks("pandas")
prices = stocks.melt("date", var_name="company", value_name="price")
prices["year"] = prices["date"].dt.year
prices["week"] = prices["date"].dt.isocalendar().week.astype(int)

plot = prices.hvplot.line(
    x="week",
    y="price",
    by="company",
    groupby="year",
    dynamic=False,
    xlim=(1, 53),
    ylim=(0, 6),
)

Save the GIF

Save with hvplot.save, the GIF format is inferred from the .gif extension. Set fps (frames per second) explicitly to control the speed of the animation:

hvplot.save(plot, 'stocks.gif', fps=2)

from IPython.display import Image

Image('stocks.gif')

Set the size and resolution

Scale the frames with the fig_size option (a percentage of the default size), and set their resolution with dpi. Both change the size of the GIF in pixels:

hvplot.save(plot.opts(fig_size=200), 'stocks_large.gif', fps=2, dpi=100)

Animate gridded data

Gridded xarray data works the same way. Select a few time steps to keep the GIF small, and fix clim so the colors mean the same thing in every frame. Here groupby='time' creates one frame per time step:

air = hvplot.sampledata.air_temperature("xarray").air
air = air.isel(time=slice(0, 20, 3))

air_plot = air.hvplot.image(
    x="lon",
    y="lat",
    groupby="time",
    dynamic=False,
    clim=(240, 300),
    cmap="coolwarm",
    clabel="Air temperature (K)",
    aspect=2,
)
hvplot.save(air_plot, "air_temperature.gif", fps=2, dpi=144)

Image('air_temperature.gif')

See also

• The HoloViews Exporting and Archiving user guide for more export options.

• How to Save Matplotlib Plots to save static images.

See also

• Display plots in notebooks, scripts and apps

• Choose a backend for saving plots

Show code cell content

Hide code cell content

from pathlib import Path

for filename in ['stocks.gif', 'stocks_large.gif', 'air_temperature.gif']:
    Path(filename).unlink(missing_ok=True)

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