Does a GPX file include your activity type?

The short answer

GPX 1.1 gives every track an optional type field — plain text, not tied to any fixed list of activities — that can hold something like "Hiking" or "Cycling" alongside the track's points and its name. Whether that field actually carries your activity type across depends on whether the app that exported the file wrote something into it, and whether the app or website you open it in bothers to read that field at all rather than asking you to pick again.

What the GPX format actually has room for

A GPX track is built mainly from points — latitude, longitude, usually an elevation and a timestamp for each one — but the format also allows a handful of things above the points themselves: a name for the track, a longer description, and a type. The type field has no fixed vocabulary built into the format. It is just a string, so an app is free to write "Hiking", "hike", a number, or nothing at all, and the format itself will not object either way.

That last part is the detail that trips people up. Because GPX does not enforce a shared list of activity types the way it enforces the shape of a coordinate, there is no guarantee that "Hiking" written by one app means the same thing to, or is even recognised at all by, whatever reads the file next.

Why the label can go missing on the way through

Two separate handoffs have to work for an activity type to survive a round trip. First, the app doing the exporting has to actually write something into the type field rather than leaving it blank — plenty of GPX files in the wild only ever carry points and a track name, because whatever produced them was never built with that field in mind. Second, whatever opens the file afterwards has to look at that field at all, and then has to make sense of whatever string is sitting inside it.

This is why people who upload a plain GPX file to a site like Strava or Garmin Connect sometimes find the activity landing there labelled generically, or under a type they did not choose, and have to correct it by hand afterwards. Nothing about the file is broken — the coordinates and elevation are intact — but the word a different app used for "hiking" was not one the receiving service recognised, so it fell back to a guess or a default instead.

What survives, and what does not

• Coordinates, elevation and timestamps — the parts of a GPX file with a strict, shared structure, and they come through intact regardless of which two apps are involved.
• The track name — a plain-text field most recording apps write and most viewers display, so it usually does carry over.
• The activity type — carries over only if the exporting app wrote it, and the importing app both reads that field and recognises the value sitting inside it.
• Anything about how the activity looked inside the original app — its icon, its colour on a map, a custom name you gave it — none of that lives in the GPX format at all, because those are choices made by an app's own interface, not properties of the route.

Things that trip people up

• Assuming a GPX file is broken because an activity uploads under the wrong label — the coordinates are fine; the type field either was not written, was not read, or said something the receiving app did not recognise.
• Expecting a custom activity name or its emoji to show up somewhere after export — GPX has no field for either. Only the plain text sitting in the name or type field travels with the route.
• Re-recording a hike because the exported file "lost" its activity — nothing was lost. Most services let you fix the activity type after upload without touching the track itself.
• Assuming every recording app fills in the type field the same way, or at all — it is optional in the format, so its presence and wording vary from one app to the next.

Where TrailCam fits in

TrailCam gives you 11 built-in activity types — hiking, running, cycling and others — plus the option to add your own with a name and an emoji, chosen before you start recording. A route, or your whole history, exports as GPX 1.1 or CSV; export is part of the optional TrailCam Pro upgrade. If an activity you exported lands somewhere else labelled differently than expected, that is worth fixing in the receiving service's own activity settings rather than treating it as a problem with the file — the track itself, and everything it measured, is unaffected either way.