Matplotlib 2 Subplots, 1 Colorbar

Question

I've spent entirely too long researching how to get two subplots to share the same y-axis with a single colorbar shared between the two in Matplotlib.

What was happening was that when I called the colorbar() function in either subplot1 or subplot2, it would autoscale the plot such that the colorbar plus the plot would fit inside the 'subplot' bounding box, causing the two side-by-side plots to be two very different sizes.

To get around this, I tried to create a third subplot which I then hacked to render no plot with just a colorbar present. The only problem is, now the heights and widths of the two plots are uneven, and I can't figure out how to make it look okay.

Here is my code:

from __future__ import division
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
from matplotlib import patches
from matplotlib.ticker import NullFormatter

# SIS Functions
TE = 1 # Einstein radius
g1 = lambda x,y: (TE/2) * (y**2-x**2)/((x**2+y**2)**(3/2)) 
g2 = lambda x,y: -1*TE*x*y / ((x**2+y**2)**(3/2))
kappa = lambda x,y: TE / (2*np.sqrt(x**2+y**2))

coords = np.linspace(-2,2,400)
X,Y = np.meshgrid(coords,coords)
g1out = g1(X,Y)
g2out = g2(X,Y)
kappaout = kappa(X,Y)
for i in range(len(coords)):
    for j in range(len(coords)):
        if np.sqrt(coords[i]**2+coords[j]**2) <= TE:
            g1out[i][j]=0
            g2out[i][j]=0

fig = plt.figure()
fig.subplots_adjust(wspace=0,hspace=0)

# subplot number 1
ax1 = fig.add_subplot(1,2,1,aspect='equal',xlim=[-2,2],ylim=[-2,2])
plt.title(r"$\gamma_{1}$",fontsize="18")
plt.xlabel(r"x ($\theta_{E}$)",fontsize="15")
plt.ylabel(r"y ($\theta_{E}$)",rotation='horizontal',fontsize="15")
plt.xticks([-2.0,-1.5,-1.0,-0.5,0,0.5,1.0,1.5])
plt.xticks([-2.0,-1.5,-1.0,-0.5,0,0.5,1.0,1.5])
plt.imshow(g1out,extent=(-2,2,-2,2))
plt.axhline(y=0,linewidth=2,color='k',linestyle="--")
plt.axvline(x=0,linewidth=2,color='k',linestyle="--")
e1 = patches.Ellipse((0,0),2,2,color='white')
ax1.add_patch(e1)

# subplot number 2
ax2 = fig.add_subplot(1,2,2,sharey=ax1,xlim=[-2,2],ylim=[-2,2])
plt.title(r"$\gamma_{2}$",fontsize="18")
plt.xlabel(r"x ($\theta_{E}$)",fontsize="15")
ax2.yaxis.set_major_formatter( NullFormatter() )
plt.axhline(y=0,linewidth=2,color='k',linestyle="--")
plt.axvline(x=0,linewidth=2,color='k',linestyle="--")
plt.imshow(g2out,extent=(-2,2,-2,2))
e2 = patches.Ellipse((0,0),2,2,color='white')
ax2.add_patch(e2)

# subplot for colorbar
ax3 = fig.add_subplot(1,1,1)
ax3.axis('off')
cbar = plt.colorbar(ax=ax2)

plt.show()

Answer 1

The solution of using a list of axes by abevieiramota works very well until you use only one row of images, as pointed out in the comments. Using a reasonable aspect ratio for figsize helps, but is still far from perfect. For example:

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

fig, axes = plt.subplots(nrows=1, ncols=3, figsize=(9.75, 3))
for ax in axes.flat:
    im = ax.imshow(np.random.random((10,10)), vmin=0, vmax=1)

fig.colorbar(im, ax=axes.ravel().tolist())

plt.show()

The colorbar function provides the shrink parameter which is a scaling factor for the size of the colorbar axes. It does require some manual trial and error. For example:

fig.colorbar(im, ax=axes.ravel().tolist(), shrink=0.75)

Answer 2

This solution does not require manual tweaking of axes locations or colorbar size, works with multi-row and single-row layouts, and works with tight_layout(). It is adapted from a gallery example, using ImageGrid from matplotlib's AxesGrid Toolbox.

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from mpl_toolkits.axes_grid1 import ImageGrid

# Set up figure and image grid
fig = plt.figure(figsize=(9.75, 3))

grid = ImageGrid(fig, 111,          # as in plt.subplot(111)
                 nrows_ncols=(1,3),
                 axes_pad=0.15,
                 share_all=True,
                 cbar_location="right",
                 cbar_mode="single",
                 cbar_size="7%",
                 cbar_pad=0.15,
                 )

# Add data to image grid
for ax in grid:
    im = ax.imshow(np.random.random((10,10)), vmin=0, vmax=1)

# Colorbar
ax.cax.colorbar(im)
ax.cax.toggle_label(True)

#plt.tight_layout()    # Works, but may still require rect paramater to keep colorbar labels visible
plt.show()