Move seaborn plot legend to a different position

Question

I'm using factorplot(kind="bar") with seaborn.

The plot is fine except the legend is misplaced: too much to the right, text goes out of the plot's shaded area.

How do I make seaborn place the legend somewhere else, such as in top-left instead of middle-right?

For seaborn >= 0.11.2 use .move_legend as shown in this answer — Trenton McKinney
– Trenton McKinney, Commented Oct 26, 2021 at 11:40

Trenton McKinney · Accepted Answer · 2021-08-19 18:53:37Z

93

Building on @user308827's answer: you can use legend=False in factorplot and specify the legend through matplotlib:

import seaborn as sns
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
sns.set(style="whitegrid")

titanic = sns.load_dataset("titanic")

g = sns.factorplot("class", "survived", "sex",
                   data=titanic, kind="bar",
                   size=6, palette="muted",
                   legend=False)
g.despine(left=True)
plt.legend(loc='upper left')
g.set_ylabels("survival probability")

plt acts on the current axes. To get axes from a FacetGrid use fig.
- g.fig.get_axes()[0].legend(loc='lower left')

edited Aug 19, 2021 at 18:53

Trenton McKinney

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answered Nov 23, 2014 at 0:59

Jules

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1 Comment

Soerendip Over a year ago

This generally does not work for seaborn plots.

Trenton McKinney · Accepted Answer · 2023-11-21 23:42:17Z

For seaborn >= 0.11.2 use seaborn.move_legend, which applies to Axes and Figure level plots, and it accepts kwargs, like title
- See matplotlib.axes.Axes.legend and How to put the legend out of the plot for parameters and their usage.
The original question asked about sns.factorplot, which has been renamed to seaborn.catplot, a figure-level plot.
For g = sns.jointplot or g = sns.JointGrid, the legend is in g.ax_joint, not g.
- sns.move_legend(g.ax_joint)
- See How to move or remove the legend from a seaborn JointGrid or jointplot.
.move_legend is for moving the legend, not changing the legend title, or labels. This should be done by cleaning the data.
- In pandas, there are various ways to change column names and the string values in a column, such as .rename, and .map.
Tested in python 3.10, pandas 1.5.0, matplotlib 3.5.2, seaborn 0.12.0
- See How can I customize the legend with Seaborn 0.12 objects? to relocate legends using the new seaborn.object interface, which debuted in seaborn 0.12.0.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import seaborn as sns

# load the data
penguins = sns.load_dataset('penguins', cache=False)

Figure Level Plot

g = sns.displot(penguins, x="bill_length_mm", hue="species", col="island", col_wrap=2, height=3)
sns.move_legend(g, "upper left", bbox_to_anchor=(.55, .45), title='Species')
plt.show()

Axes Level Plot

ax = sns.histplot(penguins, x="bill_length_mm", hue="species")
sns.move_legend(ax, "lower center", bbox_to_anchor=(.5, 1), ncol=3, title=None, frameon=False)
plt.show()

leonard · Accepted Answer · 2018-11-06 22:49:09Z

22

Check out the docs here: https://matplotlib.org/users/legend_guide.html#legend-location

adding this simply worked to bring legend out of the plot:

plt.legend(bbox_to_anchor=(1.05, 1), loc=2, borderaxespad=0.)

answered Nov 6, 2018 at 22:49

leonard

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1 Comment

Soerendip Over a year ago

This generally does not work with seaborn generated figures.

KT12 · Accepted Answer · 2019-05-06 20:31:16Z

22

Modifying the example here:

You can use legend_out = False

import seaborn as sns
sns.set(style="whitegrid")

titanic = sns.load_dataset("titanic")

g = sns.factorplot("class", "survived", "sex",
                    data=titanic, kind="bar",
                    size=6, palette="muted",
                   legend_out=False)
g.despine(left=True)
g.set_ylabels("survival probability")

enter image description here

edited May 6, 2019 at 20:31

KT12

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answered Nov 19, 2014 at 14:18

user308827

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Comments

denson · Accepted Answer · 2017-07-16 02:42:51Z

This is how I was able to move the legend to a particular place inside the plot and change the aspect and size of the plot:

import matplotlib
matplotlib.use('Agg')
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
matplotlib.style.use('ggplot')
import seaborn as sns
sns.set(style="ticks")

figure_name = 'rater_violinplot.png'
figure_output_path = output_path + figure_name

viol_plot = sns.factorplot(x="Rater", 
                       y="Confidence", 
                       hue="Event Type", 
                       data=combo_df, 
                       palette="colorblind",
                       kind='violin',
                       size = 10,
                       aspect = 1.5,
                       legend=False)

viol_plot.ax.legend(loc=2)
viol_plot.fig.savefig(figure_output_path)

This worked for me to change the size and aspect of the plot as well as move the legend outside the plot area.

import matplotlib
matplotlib.use('Agg')
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
matplotlib.style.use('ggplot')
import seaborn as sns
sns.set(style="ticks")


figure_name = 'rater_violinplot.png'
figure_output_path = output_path + figure_name

viol_plot = sns.factorplot(x="Rater", 
                       y="Confidence", 
                       hue="Event Type", 
                       data=combo_df, 
                       palette="colorblind",
                       kind='violin',
                       size = 10,
                       aspect = 1.5,
                       legend_out=True)

viol_plot.fig.savefig(figure_output_path)

I figured this out from mwaskom's answer here and Fernando Hernandez's answer here.

Xin Niu · Accepted Answer · 2020-09-10 23:16:17Z

4

it seems you can directly call:

g = sns.factorplot("class", "survived", "sex",
                data=titanic, kind="bar",
                size=6, palette="muted",
               legend_out=False)

g._legend.set_bbox_to_anchor((.7, 1.1))

answered Sep 10, 2020 at 23:16

Xin Niu

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Comments

jackfizee · Accepted Answer · 2020-02-18 10:22:22Z

1

If you wish to customize your legend, just use the add_legend method. It takes the same parameters as matplotlib plt.legend.

import seaborn as sns
sns.set(style="whitegrid")

titanic = sns.load_dataset("titanic")

g = sns.factorplot("class", "survived", "sex",
                    data=titanic, kind="bar",
                    size=6, palette="muted",
                   legend_out=False)
g.despine(left=True)
g.set_ylabels("survival probability")
g.add_legend(bbox_to_anchor=(1.05, 0), loc=2, borderaxespad=0.)

answered Feb 18, 2020 at 10:22

jackfizee

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1 Comment

Xin Niu Over a year ago

it seems this creates a new legend. In my code, I have other lines to adjust the legend (title, size, and transparency ..). If I call this to adjust the position, the following lines don't work then...

Yifu Yan · Accepted Answer · 2022-09-22 09:02:27Z

0

Using object oriented API:

fig,ax = plt.subplots(1,1)
sns.someplot(...,ax=ax)
handles, labels = ax.get_legend_handles_labels()
ax.legend(handles, labels,loc="upper left")

source: https://matplotlib.org/stable/tutorials/intermediate/legend_guide.html

edited Sep 22, 2022 at 9:02

answered Sep 22, 2022 at 7:54

Yifu Yan

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2 Comments

Trenton McKinney Over a year ago

This does not work with current versions of seaborn. Figure-level plots result in an error, and axes-level plots don't result in an error, but the legend does not appear. The correct option is seaborn.move_legend

Yifu Yan Over a year ago

I just modified my answer. If you pass ax to the argument then it should work just fine.

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