Multiple ways to remove legend in ggplot2 - Data Viz with Python and R

Removing legends in ggplot2 is a common requirement when creating clean, professional data visualizations. While legends help identify different groups or categories, there are situations where they become redundant, clutter the plot, or aren’t needed for your specific visualization goals.

In this comprehensive ggplot2 legend removal tutorial, you’ll discover 4 different methods to remove legends from your R plots. Whether you’re preparing publication-ready figures, creating dashboard visualizations, or simply cleaning up your plots, these techniques will give you complete control over legend display.

4 Methods to Remove ggplot2 Legends

Quick overview of techniques covered:

theme(legend.position="none") – Remove all legends at once
guides(color="none") – Remove specific legend types selectively
show.legend=FALSE – Disable legends within individual geom layers
easy_remove_legend() – Use the ggeasy package for simplified syntax

Adding legend to a plot is often helpful to easily understand a plot. However there are scenarios legends can be redundant or we don’t need them.

In ggplot2, we have multiple options to remove legend in a plot. In this tutorial we will see four ways to remove legend with examples.

Let us load the packages needed.

library(tidyverse)
theme_set(theme_bw(16))

How to remove legend in ggplot2

Let us make a plot with ggplot2 with legend added by color argument to aes() in the boxplot below. Note we can also add legend with fill argument to aes() function in the plot belpw.

mpg |>
  ggplot(aes(y = fct_reorder(manufacturer, cty), 
             x = cty,
             color=manufacturer))+
  geom_boxplot()+
  labs(y="manufacturer")
ggsave("how_to_remove_legend_in_ggplot.png")

1. Removing legend with theme()

One of the ways to remove legends in a ggplot is to use theme() layer with legend.position=”none’ argument. This will remove all the legends in the plot.

mpg |>
  ggplot(aes(y = fct_reorder(manufacturer, cty),  
             x=cty, 
             color=manufacturer))+
  geom_boxplot()+
  labs(y="manufacturer")+
  theme(legend.position="none")
ggsave("remove_legend_in_ggplot_with_theme.png")

How to remove legend in ggplot with theme()

2. Removing legend with guides()

mpg |>
  ggplot(aes(y = fct_reorder(manufacturer, cty), 
             x=cty, 
             color=manufacturer))+
  geom_boxplot()+
  labs(y="manufacturer")+
  guides(color="none")
ggsave("remove_legend_in_ggplot_with_guides.png")

Removing legend with show.legend=FALSE inside geom_*()

We can also remove legend using show.legend=FALSE within geom_*. In this example we use show.legend=FALSE argument inside geom_boxplot().

mpg |>
  ggplot(aes(y = fct_reorder(manufacturer, cty),
             x = cty, 
             color=manufacturer))+
  geom_boxplot(show.legend=FALSE)+
  labs(y="manufacturer")
ggsave("remove_legend_in_ggplot_with_show_legend.png")

remove legend in ggplot within geom_*. using show_legend()

Removing legend with ggeasy’s easy_remove_legend()

Fourth way to remove legend that may be easy to remember is to use ggeasy package and use the function easy_remove_legend().

library(ggeasy)
mpg |>
  ggplot(aes(y = fct_reorder(manufacturer, cty), 
             x=cty, 
             color=manufacturer))+
  geom_boxplot()+
  labs(y="manufacturer")+
  easy_remove_legend()
ggsave("remove_legend_in_ggplot_with_ggeasy.png")