Platform(s), such as mobile, website, API, other: web URLs (aka web addresses) of any pages, if relevant: https://inaturalist.org/observations/export It’s generally good data management to include metadata with exports, especially when the fields can be confusing. For example, if you use the expo…

Alright, this has now been implemented. Exports will include a README.txt that has definitions plus a link to https://www.inaturalist.org/terminology If translations are available, they’ll be in the README and display on the webpage.

I agree, great idea, and could help avoid some misunderstandings about iNat data going forward.

Any progress on this or interest to implement it? Does the draft need to be refined?

An iNat staff member brought up that doing it this way would change how exports work (you’d get a folder rather than just a CSV, for example), which might be jarring to some people. I don’t often export iNat data so I’d be interested to see how others who do would feel about it. Some other approach…

Made a Github issue here: https://github.com/inaturalist/inaturalist/issues/3687 We’re going make a page that has all the column definitions, and those will be localized (if they’ve been translated by volunteer translaters). Each export will contain a link to that page. How does that sound? Since t…

Package metadata with csv on observations/export

Feature Requests

Star3 May 10, 2022, 6:24pm 3

out of votes, but supporting

Topic		Replies	Views
Not possible to select from all existing "Observation Field" values during data export Bug Reports	4	537	May 26, 2022
Data users— what are your use cases and requests for exporting data? General	83	11868	December 14, 2022
Annotations not exporting Bug Reports	13	939	September 22, 2020
Observation fields not selectable in observation export options Bug Reports web	5	481	January 12, 2021
Data export not including project-specific observation fields Bug Reports web , staff-can-replicate	26	330	November 13, 2025

Package metadata with csv on observations/export

Related topics