How to remove axis, legends, and white padding

The axis('off') method resolves one of the problems more succinctly than separately changing each axis and border. It still leaves the white space around the border however. Adding bbox_inches='tight' to the savefig command almost gets you there; you can see in the example below that the white space left is much smaller, but still present.

Newer versions of matplotlib may require bbox_inches=0 instead of the string 'tight' (via @episodeyang and @kadrach)

from numpy import random
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

data = random.random((5,5))
img = plt.imshow(data, interpolation='nearest')
img.set_cmap('hot')
plt.axis('off')
plt.savefig("test.png", bbox_inches='tight')

I learned this trick from matehat, here:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

def make_image(data, outputname, size=(1, 1), dpi=80):
    fig = plt.figure()
    fig.set_size_inches(size)
    ax = plt.Axes(fig, [0., 0., 1., 1.])
    ax.set_axis_off()
    fig.add_axes(ax)
    plt.set_cmap('hot')
    ax.imshow(data, aspect='equal')
    plt.savefig(outputname, dpi=dpi)

# data = mpimg.imread(inputname)[:,:,0]
data = np.arange(1,10).reshape((3, 3))

make_image(data, '/tmp/out.png')

yields

Possible simplest solution:

I simply combined the method described in the question and the method from the answer by Hooked.

fig = plt.imshow(my_data)
plt.axis('off')
fig.axes.get_xaxis().set_visible(False)
fig.axes.get_yaxis().set_visible(False)
plt.savefig('pict.png', bbox_inches='tight', pad_inches = 0)

After this code there is no whitespaces and no frame.

No one mentioned imsave yet, which makes this a one-liner:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

data = np.arange(10000).reshape((100, 100))
plt.imsave("/tmp/foo.png", data, format="png", cmap="hot")

It directly stores the image as it is, i.e. does not add any axes or border/padding.