Add a background png image to ggplot2

Hey everybody,

this is just a short post but I found it very useful. I want to show you how to add images as a background to your ggplot2 plots.

To do so we need the packages png and grid

Btw, this is just a cool and fast way to import different packages at once.

As an example for a background image plot I used the Sochi Olympic Medals plot by TRinker, which looks really good.

The tutorial shows you how to create a plot based on the current medals scores which looks like this:

Add an image

First of all we need to load the picture. Just place it in your working directory and load it with:

And add a raster:

And that´s nearly all!

Now we just have to add it with the annotation_custom() function to our plot.

The result will look like this: