Add images in plottable

Plottable is a python library for plotting nice table outputs. You can custom style, colors, add images and even more with a light python syntax!
In this post, we'll see how to add images in a column with plottable. For an introduction to plottable, see Introduction to plottable and for an advanced feature check to custom colors in plottable.

Libraries

First, you need to install plottable with the following command:

pip install plottable

We'll also need the following libraries:

pandas for creating a dataframe with our data
matplotlib for customizing the table and display it

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import pandas as pd

from plottable import Table
from plottable.plots import image, circled_image
from plottable import ColumnDefinition

Dataset

Since most of the time, when we want to display a beautiful table, it comes from a pandas dataframe, we'll create a (simple) pandas df and use it as the starting point we want to make nice.

data = {'Score': [3, 12, 5, 7, 10],
        'Comment': ['Fun', 'Okay', 'Nice', 'Bad', 'Cool'],
        'Image': ['twitter', 'github', 'github', 'twitter', 'github']}
df = pd.DataFrame(data)

Image

The main thing to do is to have a column where each cell is a name of a file stored on your computer. Each file name will have the corresponding image at the end.

In our case, we don't have the file extension at the end of each cell in the 'Image' column. To cover this case, we'll use the following code:

we add a .png extension if the cell has not one, for all value in the column

Important: In your personal case, remember that you have to have locally stored the files on your computer! Fortunately, you can have them in a different directory. For example, if they are one directory 'above' your current directory you can juste add a ../ as a prefix in the cell.

# Add a .png extension to each cell in the Image column
df['Image'] = df['Image'].apply(lambda x: x+'.png' if '.png' not in x else x)

# Add a ../../static/graph prefix to each cell in the Image column
df['Image'] = df['Image'].apply(lambda x: '../../static/graph/'+x if '../../static/graph/' not in x else x)

Add an image

We use the ColumnDefinition method for adding the image in each cell:

name specifies which column to use
width specifies the width of the images
plot_fn specifies that we want to use the file name to plot the images

coldef = [ColumnDefinition(name="Image",
                           textprops={"ha": "center"},
                           width=0.5,
                           plot_fn=image)]

# Init a figure 
fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(5, 5))

# Create the Table() object
tab = Table(df, column_definitions=coldef)

# Display the output
plt.show()

Circle the images

You can very easily circle the images by changing plot_fn=image to plot_fn=circled_image.

coldef = [ColumnDefinition(name="Image",
                           textprops={"ha": "center"},
                           width=0.5,
                           plot_fn=circled_image)]

# Init a figure 
fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(5, 5))

# Create the Table() object
tab = Table(df, column_definitions=coldef)

# Display the output
plt.show()

Going further

This post explains the how to add an image in the plottable library.

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