# Exporting comments?

**URL:** <https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/exporting-comments/30603>\
**Category:** General\
**Tags:** question\
**Created:** [March 25, 2022, 6:12pm UTC](https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/exporting-comments/30603 "2022-03-25T18:12:48Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![pstouffer](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/forum.inaturalist.org/pstouffer/32/11792_2.png) [@pstouffer](https://forum.inaturalist.org/u/pstouffer)\
**Post date:** [March 25, 2022, 6:12pm UTC](https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/exporting-comments/30603/1 "2022-03-25T18:12:48Z")

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Hi all, I’m a curator of [https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/lsu-bird-window-collision-monitoring-project](https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/lsu-bird-window-collision-monitoring-project) . A student has gone through the observations and added age when it could be determined. He changed the annotation attributes and also added a comment with more details. I can’t seem to find a way to do a query that allows me to download either the annotations or the comments. Can someone help? Thanks.

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**Author:** ![pisum](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/91b2a8/32.png) [@pisum](https://forum.inaturalist.org/u/pisum)\
**Post date:** [March 25, 2022, 7:27pm UTC](https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/exporting-comments/30603/2 "2022-03-25T19:27:24Z")

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although it looks like there have been a few updates to the Export page recently, it looks like there is still not a way to export comments or annotations from that page. there is an existing [forum thread](https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/data-users-what-are-your-use-cases-and-requests-for-exporting-data/2972) where folks have discussed the new functionality they would like to have related to exporting, where you might find some alternative solutions that may help you in your case.

without going through the entire thread again, i think the best answer in your case, since you need annotations and comments, and since there aren’t that many records in your project, is probably to try to extract the data using the API via [GET /v1/observations](https://api.inaturalist.org/v1/docs/#!/Observations/get_observations).

i’m not aware of any existing tools that will put both annotations and comments into a tabular result set. however, this page could allow you to download observations with all comments and all annotations (though not in a table): [https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNat\_print\_friendly\_obs.html](https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNat_print_friendly_obs.html). if you want some other output format, you’ll probably have to code something from scratch or else adapt some code to get the information you want. do you have familiarity with any programming languages like R, Python, Javascript, etc?

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**Author:** ![pstouffer](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/forum.inaturalist.org/pstouffer/32/11792_2.png) [@pstouffer](https://forum.inaturalist.org/u/pstouffer)\
**Post date:** [March 25, 2022, 8:44pm UTC](https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/exporting-comments/30603/3 "2022-03-25T20:44:04Z")

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Thanks for the quick feedback! It looks like the approach from github should work. I’ll take a look with someone who’s better at R and see what else we could do.

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**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/uploads/inaturalist/original/2X/7/7831452cf7f0d653ff1ffd34176334b7ef1b6a17.png) [@system](https://forum.inaturalist.org/u/system)\
**Post date:** [May 24, 2022, 8:44pm UTC](https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/exporting-comments/30603/4 "2022-05-24T20:44:13Z")

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Closed on May 24, 2022, 8:44pm UTC

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