ArcGIS Pro Tutorial – How to Create a New Feature Class

By definition, a feature class is a collection of features with the same type of geometry: point, line, polygon, or annotation. In other words, a feature class can only contain one type of geometry. We cannot mix different geometries in a feature class. A feature class can be saved in a geodatabase or in shapefile format. In this article, I am going to show you how to create a new feature class in ArcGIS Pro.

Steps to Create a New Feature Class in ArcGIS Pro

Create a new feature class in a geodatabase

Open ArcGIS Pro and then create or open your project. Open the Catalog and then expand the Database folder. You should see your geodatabase under this Database folder. If not, you will need to add or create a new file geodatabase. And then, right-click the file geodatabase and choose New | Feature Class. And then we need to select the type of features from the list.

Below is a quick example of how to create a new point layer in a geodatabase.

If you want to create a new feature class in shapefile format, you can right-click on the folder where you want to save the shapefile and choose New Shapefile.

Shapefile has many limitations such as we cannot have more than 13 characters for the field name. But this limitation is not present in Geodatabase. So, I would recommend you to start using geodatabase rather than shapefile.