One colorbar for seaborn heatmaps in subplot

Question

Here is an example that shows a colorbar for each subplot:

import seaborn as sns
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import pandas as pd
import numpy as np

df = pd.DataFrame(np.random.random((10,10,)))

fig,axn = plt.subplots(2, 2, sharex=True, sharey=True)

for ax in axn.flat:
    sns.heatmap(df, ax=ax)

How can I remove the colorbars for each subplot? I'd like to have only one colorbar that is either vertically or horizontally oriented. I know I have access to each colorbar axes via fig.get_axes()[:-4], but how can I remove it from them entirely from the plot? I don't think there is an option to opt out of drawing the colorbar when heatmap is called.

Answer 1

The cbar parameter controls whether a colorbar should be added, and the cbar_ax parameter can optionally specify the axes where the colorbar should go. So, you could do:

import seaborn as sns
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import pandas as pd
import numpy as np

df = pd.DataFrame(np.random.random((10,10,)))

fig, axn = plt.subplots(2, 2, sharex=True, sharey=True)
cbar_ax = fig.add_axes([.91, .3, .03, .4])

for i, ax in enumerate(axn.flat):
    sns.heatmap(df, ax=ax,
                cbar=i == 0,
                vmin=0, vmax=1,
                cbar_ax=None if i else cbar_ax)

fig.tight_layout(rect=[0, 0, .9, 1])

(You'll get a warning about tight_layout here, but it actually is correct because we placed cbar_ax explicitly. If you don't like seeing the warning, you can also call tight_layout before plotting, but it won't be as tight).