GPX track vs. route: what's the difference?
Say "route" to a hiker and they mean the walk itself — the line on the map, wherever it ends up going. Say it to a GPX file and it means something narrower: one of two entirely different structures the format can hold, and not the one a recording app actually writes. Here is what a track and a route are inside a GPX file, why the everyday word and the technical one point at different things, and why it rarely matters until it suddenly does.
The short answer
A GPX track (<trk> in the file) is a recorded breadcrumb trail — a sequence of points with timestamps, laid down by a GPS receiver as someone actually moved. A GPX route (<rte>) is a planned path — an ordered list of waypoints meant to be followed, usually without any timing at all. An app that records a hike, walk or ride writes a track. An app built for planning where to go before setting out is more likely to write or read a route. When someone says "my route" about a hike they already did, they almost always mean the track.
Two structures built for two different moments
The distinction sits at the point in a walk where each one gets created. A route belongs to before — a path drawn out on a map ahead of time, in a planning app or by hand, as a sequence of stops meant to be reached in order. A track belongs to during and after — the actual line a GPS receiver traced through those points and everything in between, recorded as it happened rather than decided beforehand. The GPX specification keeps them as separate elements inside the same file because they answer different questions: a route describes where someone intends to go, a track describes where they went.
What actually differs in the data
Track points
A track point almost always carries a timestamp — it exists because a receiver logged a position at a moment in time, over and over, many times a minute. Strip the timestamps out and the line still draws the same, but nothing can say how fast a section was covered or when a stop happened. A track is also dense by nature: a point every few seconds for the whole distance, because that is how a receiver actually records.
Route points
A route point usually carries none of that. It is a waypoint with a name and a pair of coordinates, meant to be visited, with no sense of when or how long between one and the next. A route also tends to be sparse — a handful of waypoints marking turns or landmarks rather than a continuous trace — because it describes a plan, not a recording.
Why the everyday word and the file format disagree
The word "route," in ordinary conversation and in a lot of app interfaces, describes the whole recorded walk — the line, the distance, the shape of where someone went. That is a perfectly reasonable use of the word, and it is the one most people mean. The GPX specification just happens to have already claimed the word for something narrower: a planned sequence of stops with no recording behind it at all. The two uses are not really in conflict — they live in different contexts — but the confusion shows up the moment someone opens a file and expects to find a <rte> element that simply is not there.
Why it matters which one a file actually contains
Most of the time it does not. A map that can draw a line draws either one, and most viewers make no visible distinction between them. It starts to matter with navigation-focused tools built around following a route rather than reviewing a track: something that expects an ordered list of waypoints to guide someone along is reading for a <rte> element specifically, and a file that only contains a <trk> may not behave the way that tool expects, even though the line on a map looks identical. The reverse happens too — a hand-built route with a dozen sparse waypoints, opened somewhere expecting a dense recorded track, can look right on a map and still be missing the timing data a pace or elevation chart needs to draw anything.
Things that trip people up
- A GPX file with no <rte> at all — most recording apps never write one, because a recorded walk is a track by definition, not a plan.
- A route imported somewhere and shown with no speed or elevation chart — there was never timing data in the file to build one from.
- A tool that appears to find nothing in a file, when it only reads <rte> elements — the walk is in there as a track, just under a tag that tool is not looking for.
- Waypoints scattered along a path with no line connecting them — a sign that a track failed to import and only individual points, closer to route waypoints, came through.
Where TrailCam fits in
TrailCam records a hike, walk or ride as a GPS track — a timestamped sequence of points laid down as you actually moved — and exports it as GPX 1.1 or CSV. That is the track half of the format, and it is what nearly every service built around reviewing a completed walk, including Strava, Garmin Connect and Komoot, reads. Export is part of the optional TrailCam Pro upgrade; the app itself is free to download.
Questions
- Does a GPX file always contain a route?
- No. Most GPX files created by recording apps contain only a track and no <rte> element at all — a route is a separate, optional structure that many files never use.
- Can a single GPX file contain both a track and a route?
- Yes. The format allows waypoints, routes and tracks to sit in the same file at once, though most apps write only whichever one matches what they do — a recording app writes a track, a planning app writes a route.
- If a hiking app calls it "my route," does that mean the file has a <rte> element?
- No. That is the everyday sense of the word, not the technical one — the file almost certainly holds the walk as a <trk> element, whatever the app calls it on screen.
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.