Display multiple images in one IPython Notebook cell?

Question

If I have multiple images (loaded as NumPy arrays) how can I display the in one IPython Notebook cell?

I know that I can use plt.imshow(ima) to display one image… but I want to show more than one at a time.

I have tried:

 for ima in images:
     display(Image(ima))

But I just get a broken image link:

Answer 1

Short answer:

call plt.figure() to create new figures if you want more than one in a cell:

for ima in images:
    plt.figure()
    plt.imshow(ima)

But to clarify the confusion with Image:

IPython.display.Image is for displaying Image files, not array data. If you want to display numpy arrays with Image, you have to convert them to a file-format first (easiest with PIL):

from io import BytesIO
import PIL
from IPython.display import display, Image

def display_img_array(ima):
    im = PIL.Image.fromarray(ima)
    bio = BytesIO()
    im.save(bio, format='png')
    display(Image(bio.getvalue(), format='png'))

for ima in images:
    display_img_array(ima)

A notebook illustrating both approaches.