Well, it has been a while since I’ve posted. Over the summer I moved to beautiful Berkeley, California to start my PhD in Psychology at Cal. Moving has kept me pretty busy, but as things are starting to settle down a bit, I’ve decided to start making an effort to blog regularly (even if it’s just a short and simple post like this one).

Most posts are probably going to be Python-related (particularly from a scientific computing point-of-view). If you have any requests or suggestions, please let me know! I’m always open to ideas.

Often when I’m doing data analysis, I will need to save many figures to disk at once. For example, if I’m looking at the distribution of human responses to every stimulus I have (say, around 60 different stimuli), I’m going to need a different plot for each. Matplotlib actually has a pretty straightforward function for saving figures, but there’s a little bit of scaffolding that I like to have around it by default.

This probably seems like a lot of code, but it’s mostly commments/docstring. The important part is Line 47, where we actually save the image – but I like having the option to automatically close the figure and print out information about what’s being saved. Also, if the directory doesn’t exist that I’m trying to save to, I’d much rather it just be created than throw an error.

Here’s an example of this function in use:

import numpy as np
import pyplot as plt

# Make a quick sin plot
x = np.linspace(, 10, 100)
y = np.sin(x)
plt.plot(x, y)
plt.xlabel("Time")
plt.ylabel("Amplitude")

# Save it in png and svg formats
save("signal", ext="png", close=False, verbose=True)
save("signal", ext="svg", close=True, verbose=True)

This will create a simple sin wave and save it to “signal.png” and “signal.svg” before closing it altogether.