Does a GPX file include moving time?
Open a GPX file and search it for moving time and you will come up empty, in much the same way a search for pace turns up nothing. A track point is a position, an elevation and a timestamp, written down over and over as a route is walked â nothing in that structure sets aside time spent moving from time spent standing still. The moving time attached to a hike afterward is worked out by whichever app is doing the looking, from those bare timestamps and nothing more.
The short answer
No â a GPX track point has room for a latitude, a longitude, an elevation and a timestamp, and that is the complete list. There is no field anywhere in the format for how long a walk spent moving versus how long it spent paused or standing still. Any moving time shown for a route is a number calculated after the fact, by comparing points and the time between them, not a value read straight out of the file.
What a track point actually holds
A GPX file nests structure inside structure: a track holds one or more segments, each segment holds an ordered list of points, and each point is that same small handful of fields â latitude, longitude, elevation, time. Nothing else rides along with it. There is no flag marking a point as "moving" or "stationary," and no running total anywhere for time spent doing either. A GPX file is built to describe where you were and when, and it leaves every other number â pace, moving time, elevation gain â to be worked out by whatever reads it.
Segment breaks are a clue, not an answer
A GPX track can be split into more than one segment, and some apps close the current segment when a hike is paused and open a fresh one on resume, so a deliberate rest does sometimes leave a trace in the file. But that trace is incomplete on two counts. Not every recorder writes a new segment for a pause in the first place â plenty just keep a single unbroken segment and let the timestamps carry the gap instead. And a segment boundary says nothing about the far more common case of standing still without ever tapping pause: crouching for a photo, catching your breath at a viewpoint, waiting for someone to catch up. Those moments still show up as ordinary points, packed close together in space with time still ticking between them, indistinguishable in the raw data from someone moving very slowly.
Why two apps can open the same file and disagree
Because moving time is a judgment call rather than a stored fact, whichever app opens a GPX file draws its own line between moving and not moving â commonly a speed threshold below which a stretch of the track stops counting, though the exact threshold and how strictly it is applied is left entirely up to that app. Hand the same file to two different apps and it is entirely possible to get back two different moving times, even though every point, elevation and timestamp between them is identical. Neither number is wrong. Each is a different app's own answer to a question the file itself never actually settles.
Where TrailCam fits in
TrailCam works out moving time while a hike is happening rather than reconstructing it from a file afterward â it knows a walk was paused because you tapped pause, and keeps that paused stretch out of the moving time it shows once you are done. That figure, decided live rather than guessed at later from raw points, is part of what a whole-history CSV export can carry as a column of its own. A GPX export of the same route carries every recorded point, which is plenty for a map or an elevation profile, but like any GPX file it has no field built to hold a moving time total. GPX 1.1 and CSV export are part of the optional TrailCam Pro upgrade; the app itself is free to download.
Questions
- Does exporting a hike to GPX lose the moving time I saw in the app?
- Not exactly, because it was never something the format could store in the first place. The GPX file keeps every recorded point, which is enough for a map or an elevation profile to open it, but moving time is a separate number that has to be recalculated by whatever reads the file afterward.
- If a pause creates a new segment, does that tell a reading app exactly what counts as moving time?
- Only partly. A segment break can flag a deliberate pause, but plenty of recorders never write one, and a segment boundary says nothing about standing still without pausing, such as stopping for a photo. Most of a hike's stationary time never gets marked in the file at all.
- Does a CSV export handle moving time differently from GPX?
- Yes. A CSV summary is a flat table with one row per hike, so it can carry a moving time total as a single column, already worked out by whichever app produced the export. A GPX file only carries raw points, with no equivalent field for a finished total.
Recording your own routes
TrailCam is an iPhone app that records your route with GPS, keeps video clips, photos and voice notes pinned to the spot where you took them, and exports the result as GPX 1.1 or CSV. It is free to download.