GPX vs CSV for trail data: which should you keep?
They are not competing formats, and choosing between them is the wrong question. GPX preserves the shape of a route point by point. CSV preserves a table you can sort, filter and add up. Most people who record regularly end up wanting both, for different reasons.
What each format is for
GPX keeps the route
GPX is an XML format designed specifically for GPS data. Its job is to preserve the geometry of what you did: every recorded point, in order, with coordinates, elevation and a timestamp. Feed it to a map and you get your line back exactly as it was walked. Nothing else in common use does that as portably.
CSV keeps the numbers
CSV is a plain table — one row per record, columns separated by commas. For trail data it is normally a summary export: one row per route, with columns for date, activity, distance, duration, elevation gain and so on. It cannot store a route shape in any useful way, but it opens in Excel, Numbers, Google Sheets, R or pandas without any conversion at all.
Side by side
- Route geometry: GPX yes, CSV no (a per-point CSV is technically possible but nothing standard reads it back as a track).
- Opens in a spreadsheet: CSV yes, GPX no.
- Accepted by Strava, Garmin Connect, Komoot: GPX yes, CSV no.
- Good for "how far did I walk in March": CSV, easily. GPX, only with tooling.
- File size for a long history: CSV is tiny, GPX grows with every recorded point.
- Human-readable in a text editor: both, though GPX is verbose.
So which do you keep?
Keep GPX as the archive. It is the only one of the two that can reconstruct what actually happened; a CSV row saying "14.2 km, 4 h 10 m" can never be turned back into a map. If you only keep one thing, keep the GPX.
Keep CSV as the ledger. Once a year, exporting a summary table lets you answer questions the map cannot: which months you were most active, whether your average outing is getting longer, how the total adds up across activity types. This is a five-minute job in a spreadsheet and effectively impossible by eye across a hundred GPX files.
TrailCam exports both — a single route or the whole history as GPX 1.1, or a CSV summary — so this does not have to be a decision made once and regretted later.
A note on long-term storage
Both formats are plain text, which is the single most important property for anything you intend to still be able to read in a decade. Neither needs a specific application, a licence, or a running service to be interpreted. Store them somewhere that is not only your phone — a computer, an external drive, or a cloud folder you control — and the data outlives any individual app, including the one that produced it.
Compression is worth mentioning if your history is large: GPX is repetitive XML and typically shrinks dramatically in a zip archive, often to a small fraction of the original size. CSV is small enough that it rarely matters.
Questions
- Can CSV store a full GPS track?
- Not usefully. You can write one row per point, but no mainstream mapping service will import that as a track. If you want the route itself, use GPX.
- Is GPX or CSV better for backup?
- GPX, because it preserves the route and can be reconstructed into a map later. CSV is a useful companion for totals and trends, not a replacement.
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.