# Exporting Annotations for Machine Learning

Source: https://www.potatoannotator.com/docs/guides/exporting-annotations-for-ml

**The point of annotation is usually to train or evaluate a model, so the export format matters. Potato writes plain JSON/JSONL/CSV and also ML-native formats that training pipelines read directly, no glue code.** Choosing the target format before you label tells you how to structure your data and IDs.

For the reference, see [Export Formats](/docs/features/export-formats).

## Pick the format for the job

| Format | Use it for |
|---|---|
| **JSON / JSONL** | General-purpose; one record per item. The safe default. |
| **CSV** | Spreadsheets and quick analysis of classification labels. |
| **[CoNLL](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CoNLL)** | Token-level sequence labeling (NER, chunking) with [BIO tags](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside%E2%80%93outside%E2%80%93beginning_(tagging)). |
| **Hugging Face Datasets** | Loading straight into `transformers` training. |
| **spaCy** | Training spaCy NER and text-classification models. |
| **COCO / YOLO** | Object detection and segmentation from [image annotation](/docs/guides/image-annotation). |
| **Parquet** | Large-scale columnar storage and analytics. See [Parquet Export](/docs/features/parquet-export). |

## Setting the output format

```yaml
output_annotation_dir: "annotation_output/"
output_annotation_format: "jsonl"   # json, csv, conll, ...
```

## What ends up in the export

A typical record carries the item ID, the original content, every annotator's labels, and metadata (who, when). Keeping all annotators' labels, rather than only an aggregate, lets you compute [agreement](/docs/guides/inter-annotator-agreement) and re-aggregate later with a different method.

## Plan the export before you label

The export format constrains your input design. Sequence-labeling exports need consistent tokenization; COCO/YOLO need image dimensions; Hugging Face needs a stable label set. Decide the destination first so you don't have to re-run the study. See [Designing Data Formats for Annotation](/docs/guides/data-formats-for-annotation).

## Further reading

- [Export Formats feature reference](/docs/features/export-formats)
- [Designing Data Formats for Annotation](/docs/guides/data-formats-for-annotation)
- [Span Annotation](/docs/guides/span-annotation)