make-a-gif 0.1.0

Make gifs in python.

make-a-gif

A (very) simple package for generating gifs using matplotlib.

Installation

pip install make-a-gif

or just copy across the make_a_gif.py file to your project.

Usage

For a full suite of examples, see the examples directory - note that make-a-gif works well with Jupyter notebooks.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from make_a_gif import gif


# define a function that generates a plot for a given frame
def plotting_func(i: int) -> None:
    xs = range(i + 1)
    ys = [x**2 for x in xs]
    plt.plot(xs, ys, "-o", clip_on=False, zorder=10)
    # make sure the limits are always the same
    plt.xlim(0, 10)
    plt.ylim(0, 100)


# create the gif
gif(plotting_func, frames=range(11), fps=2, save_to="squared.gif")

Documentation

The only object exported by make-a-gif is the gif function.

gif(
    frames: Iterable[Frame],
    function: Callable[[Frame], None | str | Path | Figure],
    save_to: str | Path | None = None,
    fps: float = 10,
    css: dict[str, str] | None = None,
    savefig_kwargs: dict[str, Any] | None = None,
) -> HTML | None:
    ...

Parameters:

• frames is an iterable of arbitrary objects. These are passed in order, and one-by-one to the function.
• function takes an arbitrary frame object as input, and generates a single image for the gif. There are several behaviours here, depending on the return type of function:
  • None: assume that a matplotlib plot has been generated. This is then used as the next image in the gif. The figure is closed after each frame.
  • plt.Figure: uses the current content of the figure as the next image in the gif. No other actions are taken on the figure!
  • str or Path: assume that this points to an image file. This gets used as the next image in the gif.
• save_to is the path to save the gif to. If not provided, the gif is not saved.
• fps is the frames per second of the gif, by default 10
• css is the CSS to apply to the HTML returned by the function.
• savefig_kwargs are the keyword arguments to pass to plt.savefig when saving the figure to a file. The default is {"bbox_inches": "tight", "transparent": True}.

Returns:

gif returns an IPython.display.HTML object. This contains a base64 encoded version of the gif, and so is independent of the file system - you e.g. share notebooks that display this object as a standalone file and the gif will still work.