Does stride length affect GPS-recorded distance on a hike?

The short answer

No. Stride length has nothing to do with a GPS-based distance figure, because GPS distance is never built from steps to begin with. It comes from a plain sequence of recorded positions, and the distance between two positions is a fact about the ground, not about the body that crossed it.

Two different ways a phone can measure distance

A pedometer-style step counter works by detecting each step with the phone's motion sensors, then multiplying the step count by a stride length — either a fixed average or one the phone has tried to calibrate to your usual walk — to turn 'how many steps' into 'how far.' Change the stride, or the assumption behind it, and the estimated distance changes too, even though the steps themselves did not.

GPS-based distance skips the whole idea of a step. The phone logs a position every so often as you move, and afterwards the distance is calculated by measuring the straight-line gap between each recorded position and the next, then adding all those gaps together. Nothing in that calculation asks how many steps it took to cover any one gap, or how long your legs are — it only cares where you were, one recorded point after another.

Why the two get mixed up

A phone is capable of both kinds of measurement at once — it can count steps for one purpose in the background while a hiking app tracks GPS position for another — and seeing both a step count and a distance figure come off the same device makes it easy to assume one feeds the other. On a hike, they do not talk to each other at all. The distance a GPS track reports would come out exactly the same whether you shuffled the whole way in short steps or covered it in long, loping strides, because the track only ever recorded where you were, never how you got between one point and the next.

This is also why two hikers of very different heights, walking side by side on the same trail, end up with essentially the same GPS distance for the day, while their step counts for that same walk can differ by a meaningful margin. The step count is a property of their individual stride. The GPS distance is a property of the trail.

What actually does move the number

GPS distance is not immune to variation — it just varies for reasons that have nothing to do with your body. How often the app logs a position matters: fewer points across a winding stretch of trail can slightly undercount the true distance, since the straight lines between sparse points cut corners a dense set of points would not. Ordinary GPS position noise works the other way, adding a small zigzag to what was really a straight line and slightly inflating the total. Signal quality under tree cover, in a canyon, or near tall buildings can make that noise worse in specific stretches of a hike.

None of that has anything to do with stride, pace, or how tall you are. It is the same handful of GPS-specific causes behind most of the small distance differences hikers notice, whether that is one hike looking a little long, or two different apps disagreeing slightly on the same recorded walk.

Where TrailCam fits in

TrailCam's distance figure comes from the GPS points recorded along your route, point by point, the same way for every activity type it supports. Nothing about your stride, height, or step count is part of that calculation — the number reflects the ground you actually covered, not how you moved across it.