reducing number of plot ticks

Question

Alternatively, if you want to simply set the number of ticks while allowing matplotlib to position them (currently only with MaxNLocator), there is pyplot.locator_params,

pyplot.locator_params(nbins=4)

You can specify specific axis in this method as mentioned below, default is both:

# To specify the number of ticks on both or any single axes
pyplot.locator_params(axis='y', nbins=6)
pyplot.locator_params(axis='x', nbins=10)

If somebody still gets this page in search results:

fig, ax = plt.subplots()

plt.plot(...)

every_nth = 4
for n, label in enumerate(ax.xaxis.get_ticklabels()):
    if n % every_nth != 0:
        label.set_visible(False)

To solve the issue of customisation and appearance of the ticks, see the Tick Locators guide on the matplotlib website

ax.xaxis.set_major_locator(plt.MaxNLocator(3))

Would set the total number of ticks in the x-axis to 3, and evenly distribute it across the axis.

There is also a nice tutorial about this

There's a set_ticks() function for axis objects.

in case somebody still needs it, and since nothing here really worked for me, i came up with a very simple way that keeps the appearance of the generated plot "as is" while fixing the number of ticks to exactly N:

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

f, ax = plt.subplots()
ax.plot(range(100))

ymin, ymax = ax.get_ylim()
ax.set_yticks(np.round(np.linspace(ymin, ymax, N), 2))