The Coolest Plotly Feature That You Have Been (Possibly) Ignoring All This Time

Enrich static plots with animations.

Avi Chawla

Jan 11, 2024

Most Plotly users prefer it for interactivity purposes.

Yet, very few know that they can also use it to create animated plots.

Here’s an animated visualization I created to demonstrate this idea:

It depicts the time light takes to reach different planets after leaving the Sun.

Pretty cool and elegant, isn’t it?

Let’s understand how it works.

The core idea behind creating an animated plot relies on plotting the data one frame at a time.

Thus, we must gather our data in a single DataFrame, with one column representing the frame_id, as shown below:

In the above DataFrame:

The frame_id column increments at each frame.
The x_pos and y_pos represents the position of different objects at every frame:
- The (x,y) position stays the same for all planets.
- We only update the position of the light spot.

Now, if we invoke the scatter() method and specify the animation_frame parameter as frame_id, it will plot the data frame-by-frame — generating an animation.

This is demonstrated below:

In the above function call:

The data corresponding to frame_id=0 will be plotted first.
This will be replaced by the data with frame_id=1 in the next frame, and so on.

Pretty simple, isn’t it?

I find such utilities to be quite useful when I want to visualize dynamic changes or trends in categorical data over time.

Of course, in the “Speed of Light Visualisation plot,” I also added the images of planets to improve its visual appearance.

Yet, the idea is still the same.

Download this notebook to create the above plot yourself using Plotly: Plotly animated plot.

👉 Over to you: What other cool and lesser-known Plotly hacks are you aware of?

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