How to force two figures to stay on the same page in LaTeX?

I have two images that I want to display on a page as figures. Each eats up little less than half of the space available so there's not much room for any other stuff on that page, but I know there is enough space for both of the figures. I tried to place the figures with [ht] and [hb], both [h] and both [ht] but still I can't get those two images on the same page but instead at least few paragraphs between them.

How do I force those two figures to stay on the same page?

You can put two figures inside one figure environment. For example:

\begin{figure}[p]
\centering
\includegraphics{fig1}
\caption{Caption 1}
\includegraphics{fig2}
\caption{Caption 2}
\end{figure}

Each caption will generate a separate figure number.

If you want to have images about same topic, you ca use subfigure package and construction:

\begin{figure}
 \subfigure[first image]{\includegraphics{image}\label{first}}
 \subfigure[second image]{\includegraphics{image}\label{second}}
 \caption{main caption}\label{main_label}
\end{figure}

If you want to have, for example two, different images next to each other you can use:

\begin{figure}
 \begin{minipage}{.5\textwidth}
  \includegraphics{image}
  \caption{first}
 \end{minipage}
 \begin{minipage}{.5\textwidth}
  \includegraphics{image}
  \caption{second}
 \end{minipage}
\end{figure}

For images in columns you will have [1] [2] [3] [4] in the source, but it will look like

[1] [3]

[2] [4].

I had this problem while trying to mix figures and text. What worked for me was the 'H' option without the '!' option. \begin{figure}[H]
'H' tries to forces the figure to be exactly where you put it in the code. This requires you include \usepackage{float}

The options are explained here

If you want them both on the same page and they'll both take up basically the whole page, then the best idea is to tell LaTeX to put them both on a page of their own!

\begin{figure}[p]

It would probably be against sound typographic principles (e.g., ugly) to have two figures on a page with only a few lines of text above or below them.

---

By the way, the reason that [!h] works is because it's telling LaTeX to override its usual restrictions on how much space should be devoted to floats on a page with text. As implied above, there's a reason the restrictions are there. Which isn't to say they can be loosened somewhat; see the FAQ on doing that.

Try adding a !, e.g. [h!].

try [h!] first but else you can do it the ugly way.

LateX is a bit hard in placing images with such constraints as it manages placing itself. What I usually do if I want a figure right in that spot is do something like|:

text in front of image here
 
 \newpage 
 \figure1 
 \figure2
 
text after images here

I know it may not be the correct way to do it but it works like a charm :).

//edit

You can do the same if you want a little text at top of the page but then just use /clearpage. Of course you can also scale them a bit smaller so it does not happen anymore. Maybe the non-seen whitespace is a bit larger than you suspect, I always try to scale down my image until they do appear on the same page, just to know for sure there is not like 1% overlap only making all of this not needed.

Try using the float package and then the [H] option for your figure.

\usepackage{float}

...

\begin{figure}[H]
\centering
\includegraphics{fig1}
\caption{Write some caption here}\label{fig1}
\end{figure}

as already suggested by this insightful answer!

<https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/8625/force-figure-placement-in-text>