Updating All Figure Sizes with rcParams

If you want to change the figure size for all your plots, the best thing to do is update Matplotlib's rcParams. You can see a list of all rcParams settings in the Matplotlib documentation.

Figure size is set in inches and the default is 6.4 (width) x 4.8 (height). To update this, simply change the rcParams:

import matplotlib as mpl
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

# You can do either of these.
mpl.rcParams['figure.figsize'] = (9, 6)
plt.rcParams['figure.figsize'] = (9, 6)

That will increase the size of all the plots in the rest of your script.

Updating Figure Size Per Plot

You can also update individual plots quite easily using a few different approaches.

plt.figure

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

plt.figure(figsize=(9, 6))
# I'm big!
plt.plot(range(5), range(5))

fig.set_size_inches

This method does the same thing. It can be useful if you have access to the plot (axes) but not the figure.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

# I'm big!
plt.plot(range(5), range(5))
fig = plt.gcf()
fig.set_size_inches(9, 6)

plt.subplots

This is the object-oriented approach using plt.subplots. Very similar and simple as well.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(9, 6))
# I'm big!
ax.plot(range(5), range(5))

That's it! Change the figure size is super easy in Matplotlib, but also one of those things that's easy to forget. Feel free to bookmark this page ;)