Can you import a GPX file into Google Maps?

The short answer

The Google Maps app and the Google Maps website at maps.google.com have no menu for opening a GPX file. You can search an address, drop a pin by hand, and get turn-by-turn directions, but there is no screen anywhere in that product that reads a set of recorded coordinates and draws them back as a route. Emailing yourself the file or opening it from Files on an iPhone does not change this — Google Maps is simply not among the apps offered when a GPX file is shared.

Why the feature lives somewhere else

Google actually splits mapping across three separate products, and each one does a different job. Google Maps answers "how do I get there" — search and navigation, nothing more. Google My Maps is a different tool, reached through a Google account rather than the Maps app itself, built for constructing a custom map out of your own data: layers, pins, colours, and imported files. Google Earth is a third product again, a 3D globe viewer aimed at exploring terrain and imagery rather than getting directions to a coffee shop.

A GPX track is exactly the kind of thing My Maps was built to hold, and exactly the kind of thing Google Maps was never designed around. That is the whole explanation: it is not a missing feature so much as a feature that lives one product over.

What the other two Google products actually accept

Google My Maps

My Maps does let you import a file and draw it as a layer, which sounds like the answer — except the import panel takes KML, KMZ, GeoJSON or a spreadsheet of coordinates, not GPX directly. A GPX track has to be converted to KML first, a short extra step covered in how to convert a GPX file to KML, before My Maps will read it.

Google Earth Pro

This is the one member of the Google family that opens a GPX file with no conversion at all. Install Google Earth Pro on a computer, use File → Open, and a GPX track appears on the globe directly. It is a different piece of software from both Google Maps and My Maps, despite the shared name, which is a common source of the confusion in the first place.

The one workaround Google Maps does offer

The Google Maps search box accepts a raw pair of coordinates — latitude and longitude separated by a comma — and drops a pin at that exact spot with no file involved. That gets you a single point on the map, never a route. A GPX track is normally hundreds or thousands of points recorded in order along a walk, and typing them in one at a time was never a realistic way to reconstruct a line, so this is worth knowing about but not worth relying on for anything more than checking one location.

Where a GPX file actually goes

• Gaia GPS, Komoot and CalTopo all accept a GPX track directly and treat it as a first-class route rather than a file preview.
• Google Earth Pro opens a GPX file with no conversion step, as above.
• Strava and Garmin Connect also take a GPX upload, though both log it as a completed activity rather than a route to simply browse.
• Google My Maps gets there too, once the file has been converted to KML.

Any of these is a better fit for "I have a route, show it to me" than Google Maps will ever be, because that is the job each one was actually built around.

If what you actually want is to relive the walk

Often the real goal was never Google Maps specifically — it was revisiting a walk from a while back. The app that recorded the route is usually better placed for that than any general-purpose map, because it already knows everything that happened along the way, not just the shape of the line. TrailCam replays a recorded route on its own map, with any photo, video clip or voice note pinned to the exact spot it was captured, in the order the walk actually happened. Export to GPX 1.1 or CSV exists for taking a route elsewhere; it is part of the optional TrailCam Pro upgrade, and the app itself is free to download.