Planet uses a two-step system: you first upload your Area of Interest (AOI) to create a Feature Collection, and then use that collection's unique reference ID to deploy your data feeds.
 

Option 1 — Create a collection in the Planet UI (Features Manager)

In Features Manager, you create a collection by uploading your AOI file and giving the collection a title during import.

1. In the Collections header, click the blue upload*button to open the upload modal (or drag and drop your file into the application).

2. Select your AOI file. Supported formats are GeoJSON, Shapefile, WKT, GPX, KML, and KMZ. Only Polygon and MultiPolygon geometries are supported.

3. Go to the To Review tab and give the collection a name. Optionally map your file's properties to each feature's ID, title, and description.

4. If any geometry is invalid (for example, it exceeds the 1,500-vertex limit), it appears for review. 

Use Fix and import to apply the least-additional-area simplification, or Simplify manually to choose per feature.

5. Click Finish upload. The new collection appears at the top of the Collections panel.
 

To share the collection with your organization, open the collection's three-dot more menu and select Manage sharing.

Option 2 — Create a collection with the Features API

With the API you create the collection first, then add features to it.
Step 1: Create the collection

Make a `POST` request to the /collections endpoint with a title (required) and an optional description:

curl -X POST https://api.planet.com/features/v1/ogc/my/collections \
  -u "$PL_API_KEY:" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "title": "Chicago",
    "description": "AOI of the city of Chicago"
  }'

The title is used to build a URL-safe "" that becomes part of the collection's ID, combined with a hash — for example, a collection titled My Great Places gets an ID like my-great-places-<hash>. 

You can also reference the collection by the hash alone, which means you can rename the collection later without breaking references.

 If your features carry properties you'd like Features Manager to use for each feature's title and description, set title_property and description_property when creating the collection:

curl -X POST https://api.planet.com/features/v1/ogc/my/collections \
  -u "$PL_API_KEY:" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "title": "Boroughs",
    "description": "Boroughs of New York City",
    "title_property": "borough_name",
    "description_property": "borough_description"
  }'

Step 2: Add features to the collection

Add your AOIs by posting GeoJSON features to the collection's items endpoint:

curl -X POST https://api.planet.com/features/v1/ogc/my/collections/<collection-id>/items \
  -u "$PL_API_KEY:" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{ <your GeoJSON Feature or FeatureCollection> }'

Geometries are validated on upload against Planet's geometry rules (for example, a 1,500-vertex limit on polygons). To check your geometries before adding them — and to see why one might be rejected — post them to the validation endpoint first. 

See Uploading and Validating Features in the docs for the validation payload and details.
 

Share the collection

By default a feature collection is private — only you can see it. You can share it with your organization so others can read the collection and copy its feature references. 

In the API this is done via the collection's permissions endpoint; in Features Manager, use Manage sharing.

Next steps: use your features

Once features are saved, reference them in other Planet APIs instead of passing GeoJSON. 

A feature reference looks like:

pl:features/my/<collection-id>/<feature-id>

You can use that reference as the geometry in the Data, Orders, and Subscriptions APIs. You can also reference a whole collection pl:features/my/<collection-id> — for example, to create subscriptions in bulk, one per feature in the collection.

The following would be an example subscription request for Forest Carbon Monitoring:

{
  "name": "forest-carbon-monitoring-block-A7",
  "source": {
    "type": "forest_carbon_monitoring",
    "parameters": {
      "id": "CANOPY_HEIGHT-CANOPY_COVER-ACD_v1.0_3",
      "geometry": {
        "type": "ref",
        "content": "pl:features/my/feature_collection-a1b2c3d/block-A7x9"
      },
      "start_time": "2026-01-01T00:00:00Z",
      "end_time": "2026-12-31T23:59:59Z"
    }
  },
  "delivery": {
    "type": "amazon_s3",
    "parameters": {
      "bucket": "fake-forest-carbon-bucket",
      "aws_region": "us-east-1",
      "aws_access_key_id": "<FAKE_ACCESS_KEY_ID>",
      "aws_secret_access_key": "<FAKE_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY>",
      "path_prefix": "forest_carbon/block_A7/"
    }
  },
  "notifications": {
    "webhook": {
      "url": "https://example.com/fake/webhook/forest-carbon",
      "topics": ["delivery.success"]
    }
  }
}

To find a collection's ID in Features Manager, open the collection and copy the collection=<id> value from the URL. 

To copy a single feature's reference, open the collection, click the three-dot more menu next to the feature, and select Copy feature reference.