https://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/75092/maximum-length-of-text-fields-in-shapefile-and-geodatabase-formats

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoJSON

https://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/92885/ogr2ogr-converting-kml-to-geojson

If you happened to be working with….  KML data (or any data with large description strings) and transitioning it into the ESRI Story Map toolset, there is a very good chance  you hit the the dBase 254 character length limit with the ESRI Shapefile upload.  Shapefiles are always a terrible idea.

 

the solution:  with GDAL or QGIS (alright, even in ArcMap), one can use GeoJSON as an output format AND import into the story map system- with complete long description strings!

 

QGIS:

Merge vector layers -> save to file -> GeoJSON

arcpy:
import arcpy

import os

arcpy.env.workspace = “/desktop/arcmapstuff”

arcpy.FeaturesToJSON_conversion(os.path.join(“outgdb.gdb”, “myfeatures”), “output.json”)

GDAL:
<
ogr2ogr -f GeoJSON output.json input.kml