I think this is different: I am specifically talking about a difference in behavior between interactive save and savefig.

I suspect this has been here much longer and is related to the some what convoluted method that print_figure is finally called either going through the 'save' button or savefig. I have a vague memory of trying to trace through all of that a few years ago and giving up.

There was a related pull request here: #6197 for savefig.facecolor and savefig.edgecolor. It should be simple to add savefig.transparent.

Looks like the following chunk from Figure.savefig

        if transparent:
            kwargs.setdefault('facecolor', 'none')
            kwargs.setdefault('edgecolor', 'none')
            original_axes_colors = []
            for ax in self.axes:
                patch = ax.patch
                original_axes_colors.append((patch.get_facecolor(),
                                             patch.get_edgecolor()))
                patch.set_facecolor('none')
                patch.set_edgecolor('none')

should be moved to print_figure (which savefig ultimately calls, so there's no need to keep it in both places).

Sounds reasonable.

The restore code would also have to move.

I think the correct strategy is

• quickfix: use savefig everywhere instead of print_figure,
• later: move everything from savefig to print_figure, so that savefig is a completely empty wrapper for print_figure (we could also have moved everything from print_figure to savefig and have print_figure be a minimal dispatcher to the print_* methods, but that would cause a backcompatibility break as print_figure would lose some capabilities).

Closed by #9124.