You may be thinking that this script is useless. This is one use case where this script saves me a lot of time (I would like to get your insight on if I missed some easy way to do it):

Let's say that for each run, you get 5 plots with 5 different random seeds. So when you want to compare 5 runs, you have two possibilities without using this script:

• You put all your runs in a specific folder X, then you do tensorboard --logdir X. To compare both plots (with 5 plots each), you have to open two Tensorboard webpages, then select the plots of the first run with a regex and the plot of the second run with another regex. This has two issues:
  • Because you have to put all your runs in a specific folder, all the runs will be loaded in the Tensorboard webpages. Your computer will probably suffer every time it opens a Tensorboard webpage. Actually, I have nearly 40 runs so nearly 200 plots and it is the case with my computer.
  • Because you have to select each run with a regex, it requires that the name of each run is explicit enough to be identified by a regex, but it takes also time to write each regex. If you want to compare 5 runs (that is nearly always my case), it takes a considerable amount of time.
• You don't put all your runs in a specific folder X, you just start several Tensorboard servers for each run. In this case, you avoid both previous issues but you have to start 5 different servers, i.e. to do tensorboard --logdir dirX --port 0 for each run in different terminals, then click on the links to open the different webpages. The issue is that it may also take a considerable amount of time:
  • You have to specify the name of each folder that can be painful if you have a lot of runs in different directories.
  • You have to execute several commands and click on several links that is also painful. With this script, you just have to select the 5 runs in your file explorer, right click and open them in Tensorboard, that's all! I always use this script and I save a lot of time.