Best way to export image / animation from GUI, including colorbar

Hi, am am trying to export a graphics file from a uifigure. The plot has several layers and elements, and also features a colorbar outside of the axes. I tried getframe(gcf) and getframe(gca), both are not suitable (one does not include the colorbar, the other does include the whole uifigure, see attachments).

In the past, I was copying all elements from the uifigure to a new, invisible figure using copyobj, then using getframe(gca) to get a clean image that includes the colorbar. But this involves a lot of extra code to deal with all the details, and this is prone to errors I think.

I wonder if there are good ways to achieve this?

My GUI does not only display still images, but also image sequences. Hence, I additionally want to write videofiles directly from this Matlab GUI. So I think exportfig is not really an option?

Thanks for your input!

[Mario Malic]

I would suggest to output an image, open it and remove the portion which you don't want to be in the picture. By this, I mean to "crop" the part you want to save.

[William Thielicke]

Hi, this is something that I also consider, but it involves an additional file read and file write, which is slow for animations....

Answer 1

[William Thielicke]

I think I am close to a good solution:

The function that does all the plotting / imagesc / scatter in the uifigure got an additional input argument: The target axis. Now I can select if the graphics are plotted in the uifigure, or in a new, hidden figure. This hidden figure is a regular figure without ui elements. Therefore I can export it in a simple way with getframe(target_axis).

[William Thielicke]

Unfortunately, the figure cannot be hidden, because then all of Matlabs plotting doesn't work properly. WHAT A MESS. Incredible that I am spending days on finding out how to plot figures properly....

[Viktor Janzen]

I have a similar problem. Because I am offering my uifigure within a webapp, it is not possible to open a second figure (visible or hidden), beacuse Web Apps do not support multi-window application.

I had a solution with getframe. But the big problem with getframe is that it makes a snapshot from the whle uiffigure, considering also all hidden UI components and then reduces the frame to the axes, which is the input argument. For my animation it takes about 4 seconds per frame.

I tested with deleting many hidden UI components. Then it takes half of the time.

You can also put the uifigure as input argument. Then a video from the whole app is made.