Does it matter whether a GPX file is version 1.0 or 1.1?

The short answer

For reading a route back, no. GPX 1.0, published in 2002, and GPX 1.1, published in 2004 and now the version almost everything uses, both describe a route the same way: waypoints, routes, and tracks made of track segments made of track points, each point carrying a latitude, longitude, and usually an elevation and a timestamp. That structure — the one a mapping app actually needs to draw your walk — is essentially unchanged between the two versions. A modern app opening either file reads the coordinates the same way regardless of which number sits in the opening tag.

What actually changed in 1.1

The differences sit in the file's edges, not its spine. GPX 1.0 scattered a handful of descriptive fields — things like a route's author or an outside web link — as individual, one-off entries at several levels of the file. GPX 1.1 gathered most of that into a single metadata block near the top and gave links their own repeatable element, so a file could point to more than one outside reference cleanly instead of being limited to one. It also added a formal extensions mechanism: a sanctioned place, at several levels of the file, where an app can add its own custom data without breaking the schema for any other app trying to read the same file. None of that touches how a track point itself is written.

Put differently: 1.1 tidied up the parts of the format that describe the file, and gave apps a safe way to bolt on extra data of their own. The part that describes where you actually walked was already fine in 1.0 and stayed the same.

Why this almost never causes a real problem

Every mapping tool, watch platform, and hiking app that supports GPX at all was built to read the coordinate structure, and that structure is what stayed constant. In practice this means a file exported as 1.0 by an old device and a file exported as 1.1 by a current app both open the same way in the same modern tools — the version number in the opening tag is closer to a label than a gate. It is rare for software still receiving updates to refuse a file purely because it says 1.0 instead of 1.1, or the other way around.

When a GPX file actually does fail to open

When an import genuinely fails, the version number is almost never the reason. Malformed XML, a required field left empty, or a track with no points in it will stop an import cold regardless of which version the file claims to be — a file can declare itself 1.1 and still be broken in a way that has nothing to do with the schema version at all.

Things that trip people up

• Assuming a file has to be converted from 1.0 to 1.1, or the reverse, before some app will accept it — for the coordinate data itself, there is normally nothing to convert; the points read the same either way.
• Blaming a failed import on the version line at the top of the file, when the actual cause is almost always something else in the file being malformed.
• Expecting a newer app to show more detail from a 1.1 file than from a 1.0 file of the same walk — the extra structure in 1.1 is mostly optional extension data an app may or may not use; the route itself looks the same either way.
• Treating the version number as a sign of how recent or accurate a track is — it says which edition of the schema the file follows, nothing about when the walk happened or how good the GPS fix was.

Where TrailCam fits in

TrailCam exports a route, or your whole history at once, as GPX 1.1 — the version Strava, Garmin Connect and Komoot read. That choice is really about writing to the version everything expects today rather than about needing anything specific that only 1.1 offers; a hike recorded and exported from TrailCam opens the same way in any of those tools as it would from a 1.0 file, because the coordinates underneath are built the same way either version is declared. Export is part of the optional TrailCam Pro upgrade; the app itself is free to download.