GPX waypoint vs. track point: what's the difference?

The short answer

A track point (<trkpt>, sitting inside a <trkseg> inside a <trk>) is one of many points recorded in order as a GPS receiver moved, meant to be joined into a continuous line. A waypoint (<wpt>) is a single point standing on its own — a trailhead, a viewpoint, a parking spot — with no sequence and no neighbours. An app can draw a line from track points because it is safe to assume point two comes right after point one. It cannot make that assumption about a waypoint, because nothing in the file says a waypoint has any relationship to any other point at all.

What a track point actually is

A track point exists because a receiver was recording continuously. Walk for an hour and a GPS app writes down a position every so often, each one landing inside a <trkseg>, and each <trkseg> sits inside a <trk> — the structure that represents one continuous act of moving. Order matters here in a way it does not for a waypoint: point 400 is understood to have happened after point 399, and a viewer draws the line by walking through the list in exactly that order. Most track points also carry a timestamp, which is what lets an app work out how fast you were moving between two of them, or how long the whole thing took.

None of that is true of a single point pulled out on its own. A lone coordinate with no ordering and no neighbours is not really a track point in any useful sense, even sitting inside a <trk> element — it is the sequence that carries the meaning, not any one point in it.

What a waypoint actually is

A waypoint marks one place someone cared about enough to flag — a trailhead, a water source, a spot worth remembering, a pin a route-planning app dropped. It stands alone in the file, outside any track or route structure, and does not have to carry a timestamp at all, because a location someone wants to remember does not need to say when it was marked. A GPX file can hold any number of waypoints alongside a track, and the two coexist without needing to reference each other.

This is also why waypoints turn up in very different kinds of file than tracks do. A path someone planned before setting out — a list of turns or stops to hit in order — is more likely to be built almost entirely from waypoints, because nothing has been recorded yet. A recorded hike is the opposite: overwhelmingly track points, with maybe a handful of waypoints marking specific spots along the way.

Why this shows up as "only pins, no line"

This is the practical reason the distinction is worth knowing. Hand a GPX file to an app that expects a track, and give it a file built from waypoints instead, and it does the only sensible thing it can: it drops a pin for every point and draws no line at all, because nothing in a waypoint says which one comes next. The file has not failed to import — it imported exactly what was in it. What looks like a broken track is usually a file that was never a track to begin with, often one exported from a tool built around marking locations rather than recording a continuous route.

Where TrailCam fits in

TrailCam records a hike as a continuous track — GPS points logged in order as you walk, not a scattering of marked locations — and exports it as GPX 1.1 or CSV, for a single route or the whole history at once. That is the structure Strava, Garmin Connect and Komoot expect, and it is why the result shows up as a line rather than a handful of unconnected pins. Export is part of the optional TrailCam Pro upgrade; the app itself is free to download.