Any reason why it is not possible to filter issues by owner in a GitHub Projects view?

[igorgiumellizup]

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Hi Guys,

I've been using GitHub Projects for a while now. The multiple ways you can set up and combine views and filters are awesome, but our team is starting to lose track of the issues we open daily.

We thought of creating a view called "Opened by us", which would list all the issues our team opened. We imagined that it would be possible to create a filter and include our team members in the field "owner", and everything would work out as a charm.

However, and for our astonishment, we found out that there's simply no way to filter using the native field "owner" in GitHub Projects! Talk about a simple feature that blocks a lot of content for management. Is there a way to workaround this, or a reason for that?

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• I have read the above statement and can confirm my post is relevant to the GitHub feature areas Issues and/or Projects.

[shriram7057]

Thanks for raising this — it’s a very common use case, and you're right that it’s not immediately obvious why filtering by owner isn’t supported in GitHub Projects.

Currently, Projects (Beta) only exposes a subset of item metadata in its filter system. Fields like status, labels, assignees, and custom fields are filterable, but the issue creator (owner) is not exposed as a filterable property. This is a known limitation of the current Projects architecture.

Why owner is not available

The owner field is tied to the underlying GitHub Issue metadata, but Project views operate on their own schema. Only fields that are intentionally mapped into the Project’s data model are accessible in filters. Since issue creator isn’t one of those mapped properties, it doesn’t appear as a filter option.

Workarounds you can use today

1. Use a Custom Field (e.g., “Opened by”)
   You can add a single-select or text custom field to your Project and populate it automatically using:

a GitHub Action

a workflow triggered on issues: opened

or even a manual bulk edit

This allows you to filter directly in your Project view using the custom field.

2. Filter by author: in the global Issue Search, then bulk-add results to the Project
   While you can’t filter inside the Project view by owner, you can use GitHub’s issue search:

author:@username
org:your-org repo:your-repo

Then add the filtered issues to your Project, or simply treat this as a separate “Opened by us” reference view.

3. Create Saved Filters or Views per team member
   If your team has a predictable set of creators, you can create multiple views such as:

creator:alice
creator:bob
creator:charlie

(Using Search first, then adding those sets into separate views.)

Is support for owner planned?

The GitHub Projects team has acknowledged similar requests in public discussions. While there’s no confirmed timeline, exposing more issue metadata — including creator — has been a frequently requested enhancement. Adding your use case to the existing feedback channels helps prioritize it.

[imalkipinto]

the owner field is currently not provided as a filterable property, which means you can’t directly create a view like “Opened by Us” using that field. This is a known limitation here.
use the field creator: (from GitHub Issues) instead of owner.

another better way
Create a custom field in your Project,
for example:
Filed By → single-select
Then use an automation or manually tag issues as they are created.
Now you can filter your Project view using this custom field.