Life List Print

How to export your iNaturalist observations

Life List Print reads the observations export iNaturalist gives you. The file has to be a CSV, and it needs a few columns, which are listed below.

The steps

  1. Use the iNaturalist website in a web browser, signed in to your account. iNaturalist’s help centre says anyone with an account can export data as a spreadsheet in CSV format. A forum answer from October 2025 says the export is done on the web version of iNaturalist.
  2. Use the Explore page to get the set of observations you want to export. For your own, a forum answer from October 2025 gives the address form inaturalist.org/observations?user_id= followed by an account name, which lists that account’s observations.
  3. Click on Filters and click on Download. The help centre adds that you can instead go directly to the Export page. An iNaturalist staff member wrote the same in June 2020. A forum answer from October 2025 calls it the export button in the filter dialog, so the label on your screen may now be different.
  4. Before you download, look at the Verifiable box. A forum moderator wrote in March 2021 that unchecking it is how to include Casual grade observations. Leave it checked and the file holds none; uncheck it and the file holds them. The Species page counts casual observations by default, as iNaturalist does for the Species count on a profile, and its choice box can leave them out. The next section says what the words mean.
  5. On the export page, follow the prompt to create a CSV export; a forum moderator describes it in those words. The help centre does not describe the export page itself, and we did not read it (see Sources read), so we cannot name its buttons or its column choices for you.
  6. When iNaturalist gives you the file, drop the CSV itself, not a zipped copy, on the Species page.

Do not open the file and save it again in a spreadsheet program before dropping it: a program that rewrites a CSV can change dates and special characters. Drop the file exactly as iNaturalist gave it. The exports we tested were named observations- and a number, for example observations-751457.csv; your name may differ.

Which observations count

iNaturalist’s help centre defines a Verifiable observation as one that has an accurate date, is accurately georeferenced (it has latitude and longitude), has photos or sounds, and is not of a captive or cultivated organism or of a human. Verifiable observations are labelled Needs ID until they either become Research Grade or are voted Casual. The help centre says Casual grade observations are not considered Verifiable, and that an observation reverts to Casual if the conditions for Verifiable are not met.

So a species you recorded without a photo or sound, or without a date or a location, is Casual, as is one that is captive or cultivated. The Species page offers three choices, named as the engine names them: All observations (the default), Verifiable (research-grade and needs-ID observations, Casual left out) and Research grade only. It states the choice every time, in the line under the drop zone.

The default is All observations, casual included, because that is how the Species count on an iNaturalist profile counts. This is not in the help centre. It comes from iNaturalist’s open-source code, which works that number out without a quality filter, and from the public API: on 15 October 2026 a profile’s Species count matched the API’s unfiltered count for two observers, exactly for one and within one for the other. We did not check iNaturalist’s Life List page, which is a different screen.

The poster counts species only. iNaturalist’s own Species count also counts identifications at genus or above that have nothing beneath them, so it can be larger than the poster’s number; the Species page says how far apart the two are for your file.

What the file needs

The three real exports we read in full, and the first lines of two more files, do not all carry the same columns, which suggests the export lets you choose them; the help centre does not say, and we did not read that part of the export page. Life List Print needs two columns and uses several more if they are there. These are the column names as they appear in the first line of those files, not names read off the export page:

Columns Life List Print reads
ColumnWhat it is used for
scientific_nameNeeded. The species.
observed_onNeeded, or time_observed_at or observed_on_string. The date of each observation, for the first species, the milestones and the latest.
quality_gradeWhich observations count. Without it every observation identified to species is counted, and “Research grade only” is unavailable.
taxon_species_nameTells a species from a genus or a larger group, and rolls subspecies up to their species.
taxon_family_nameThe families the species are grouped under. Without it the species are grouped under the order, class, phylum or kingdom column if the file has one, and not grouped if it has none.
common_nameThe names on the poster. Where it is empty, the scientific name is set in italic.
iconic_taxon_name, taxon_kingdom_nameThe title: “Every Plant I Have Seen” for a list of plants, “Every Species I Have Seen” for a mixed one.
place_guess, place_country_nameOnly for First seen: Date and place, and for the line at the top when every species was first seen in one country.

Every other column is ignored. The page says in a sentence what it did when one of the optional columns was missing.

Then

Go to the drop zone and drop the file. If the page says it cannot read the file, check that it is the CSV from iNaturalist and not a screenshot, a PDF or a spreadsheet saved in another format. If it says it is an eBird file, the eBird page is here.

Sources read