💾Saving Graphs in R

Create a Plot

Let's create a basic scatterplot by plot() function in R.

# Load Data
data(mtcars)

# Create a basic graph
plot(x=mtcars$wt, y=mtcars$mpg, xlab = "wt", ylab = "mpg", frame = FALSE)

Output:

Saving Graphs

Generally, we can save R graphs by:

1. By RStudio

2. By R code

By RStudio

Plots panel –> Export –> Save as Image or Save as PDF

We can also choose other formats to save in RStudio.

By R code

It is also possible to use R code to save the graphs.

1. Utilize functions such as jpeg(), png(), svg() or pdf() to determine the files in which to save your image. You can also include additional arguments to specify the width and height of the image.

2. Create the plot

3. Close the file with dev.off()

# 1. Open jpeg file
jpeg("plotname.jpg", width = 300, height = "350")

# 2. Create a basic graph
plot(x=mtcars$wt, y=mtcars$mpg, xlab = "wt", ylab = "mpg", frame = FALSE)

# 3. close the file with dev.off()
dev.off()

Alternatively, we can first create the plot and then copy the plot to a graphics device.

# 1. Create a basic graph
plot(x=mtcars$wt, y=mtcars$mpg, xlab = "wt", ylab = "mpg", frame = FALSE)

# 2. Copy the plot
dev.copy(pdf,"plotname.pdf",width=7,height=5)

# 3. Close the graphics device
dev.off()