Does a GPX file record the weather during a hike?
No, and not because of some oversight left out of a later version â a GPX file was never built to remember weather in the first place. Open one up and every ordinary point carries a position, an elevation and a timestamp. Rain, sun, wind, temperature: none of it has a field of its own, in GPX 1.0, GPX 1.1, or any revision of the schema since. If you want to remember that it was raining on a particular climb, the GPX file recording that climb is not where that memory is going to be waiting for you.
The short answer
A GPX track point is defined by a small, fixed set of fields: latitude, longitude, usually an elevation, and usually a timestamp. That is the entire vocabulary the core schema gives a point to describe itself with. There is no field named for rain, wind, temperature, cloud cover, or anything else the sky was doing at the moment a point was logged, because a GPX point was designed to answer one question â where and when â and weather is not part of that question.
What a GPX file was actually designed to hold
GPX exists so a route can move between mapping and GPS tools without losing its shape: Strava, Garmin Connect, Komoot and most GIS software all read the same handful of fields, which is exactly what keeps a file portable between them. That interoperability depends on the schema staying small and predictable. Every field that exists in it earns its place by being something nearly every receiving tool can use â a coordinate, a height, a time. Weather is a real property of the moment a point was recorded, the same way a photo taken there is, but it sits outside the narrow job the format was built to do, so it was never given a field to sit in.
The one place it could theoretically hide
The GPX schema does allow an optional extensions block on a point, meant for exactly the kind of data the core fields never anticipated. A weather-capable outdoor GPS unit could, in principle, write an ambient reading into a point's extensions the same way it might write a proprietary accuracy code there. In practice this is rare in anything a phone produces, and even where it happens, an extensions block is only readable by software that recognises the specific namespace it was written under â a different app opening the same file is free to skip straight past it. A GPX file that does carry a stray weather reading buried in extensions is not offering it up as something you can rely on finding, or that any other tool is guaranteed to show you.
Why this feels like it should be in there
- A GPX file already has an exact timestamp for every point, and weather records for a given place and time exist elsewhere â it feels like the two should already be connected, when really they are two separate datasets that happen to share a clock.
- A barometer inside the phone is already reading air pressure to help estimate elevation, which can make it seem like the phone "knows" the weather during a hike â it is reading pressure for height, not logging conditions, and none of that reading is written back into the GPX file as weather.
- Photos taken on the same walk often show the weather plainly, which makes the absence of the same information from the GPX file feel like an inconsistency rather than what it actually is: two different kinds of file doing two different jobs.
Where the memory of the weather has to live instead
Since the file itself will not remember it, anything about the weather on a walk has to be captured some other way, at the time, if it is going to survive past the day. A photo of the sky, a video clip of the rain actually falling, or a quick voice note saying it started pouring right after the second overlook all keep that context alongside the walk, even though none of it is inside the GPX file describing the same route. The timestamp on a GPX point can still be lined up against the timestamp on a photo or a note taken around the same moment, by hand, which is the closest the two ever come to talking to each other.
Where TrailCam fits in
TrailCam records a route from GPS and lets you pin a photo, a video clip or a voice note to the exact spot where you noticed something worth keeping â including what the weather was doing, if that is what made a moment worth marking. None of that rides inside the GPX export itself, which stays a plain track of position, elevation and time so it opens cleanly in Strava, Garmin Connect or Komoot; the photo, clip or note stays with the hike inside TrailCam, where replaying the route brings it back together with everything you captured along the way. GPX and CSV export are part of the optional TrailCam Pro upgrade; the app itself is free to download.
Questions
- Can I add weather information to a GPX file myself?
- Only informally. You could type a note into a waypoint's description field, but there is no dedicated weather field for it to live in, and most tools that read the file back will treat it as plain text rather than as weather data.
- Does any fitness or mapping app store weather alongside a route?
- Some do, inside their own database rather than inside the GPX file itself â the same way a photo pinned to a route lives in the app that recorded it, not in the exported track. Export that same route as GPX and only the coordinates travel; anything else the app kept about the day stays behind.
- If I want to remember the weather on a hike, what actually works?
- Capturing it directly, at the time â a photo of the sky, a short video clip, or a spoken voice note â is what survives. Lining that up afterward against the GPX file's own timestamps is the closest the two records ever get to being connected.
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.