At the moment, I think this is the way to do it indeed.
Another way to do it: If youβre using nbconvert to convert your notebook to LaTeX for example (HTML works similarly I think), the plotly figures will be automatically converted to PNG.
I tag @jmmease; His rework on the renderers (https://github.com/plotly/plotly.py/pull/1474) was merged a few days ago into the master branch. With the new renderers, it will be possible to do static plots by passing an argument.