Gif creation

Sometimes it’s a great option to create animated plots in your notebook. This page will show you how to convert banch of matplot lib plots to frames of the gif image.

import io

from PIL import Image
from IPython.display import Image as IPImage

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

There are three important points:

• You have to store each frame as a buffer and convert it into a PIL.Image.

• Create a list of such PIL.Image objects for each frame;

• Then use save of the first frame, pass all others in append_images parameter and specify format=GIF;

• Finally, you can pass the gotten buffer to the IPython.display.Image function - so your gif will be displayed on your notebook.

X = np.linspace(0, np.pi/2, 20)
frames = []

for bias in np.linspace(0, np.pi*2 - 0.1, 50):
    fig = plt.figure()
    plt.plot(X, np.sin(X+bias))
    plt.ylim([-1,1])
    
    buf = io.BytesIO()
    plt.savefig(buf, format='png')
    
    plt.close(fig)
    
    frames.append(Image.open(buf))

gif_buf = io.BytesIO()
frames[0].save(
    gif_buf, 
    format='GIF', 
    save_all=True, 
    append_images=frames[1:],
    loop=0
)

IPImage(data=gif_buf.getvalue())