How to export a hike to GPX

The short answer

Open the finished route in whatever app recorded it, find the share or export action, and choose GPX. You get a single file, usually a few dozen to a few hundred kilobytes for a day hike. From there you can email it to yourself, drop it in Files or iCloud Drive, or hand it straight to another app through the iOS share sheet.

In TrailCam, export is available for a single route or for your whole history at once, in GPX 1.1 or CSV. Export is part of the optional TrailCam Pro upgrade.

What actually ends up in the file

A GPX file is XML. Inside a track you get a sequence of track points, and each point carries at minimum a latitude and longitude. Most recorders also write an elevation and a UTC timestamp per point, which is what makes speed, pace and elevation profiles reconstructable later. The file typically also names the activity and carries a track name.

What a GPX file does not carry is anything the format has no field for. Photos, video and audio you captured along the way are separate media files; a GPX track can reference a waypoint at the right coordinates, but the media itself lives outside the file. If your route matters to you because of what you filmed on it, keep the app export and the media together, or keep the original recording in the app as the master copy.

Getting the file into other services

Strava

Strava accepts GPX uploads on the web at the "Upload activity" page — choose "File", pick the GPX, and it will build an activity from the points, deriving distance, moving time and elevation itself. Strava recalculates rather than trusting your app's summary numbers, so small differences between the two are normal and not a sign that anything is broken.

Garmin Connect

Garmin Connect imports GPX either as an activity (a thing you did) or as a course (a thing you plan to do). If you want the hike to show up in your history, import it as an activity. If you want to follow the same route again on a watch, import the same file as a course instead.

Komoot and general mapping tools

Komoot, Gaia GPS, CalTopo, QGIS, Google Earth and most desktop GIS packages will open a GPX directly. Because the format is plain text, worst case you can open it in a text editor and see your own coordinates.

Things that go wrong, and why

• The upload is rejected as empty — usually the recording had too few points, for example a route stopped seconds after it started.
• The times look wrong by several hours — GPX timestamps are UTC by convention. The receiving service applies your profile timezone, so a mismatch is a settings problem on their side, not a corrupt file.
• Elevation looks noisier than expected — phone elevation comes from GPS and, on newer phones, a barometric sensor. Some services silently replace your elevation with their own terrain model, which is why the same file can report two different climb totals in two places.
• The file will not open on a computer — check it was not renamed to .txt by an email client. GPX is XML; the extension matters to the receiving app, not to the contents.

Why export at all

Two reasons, and both are about you rather than about any one app. The first is portability: a GPX file is readable in twenty years by anything that can parse XML, which is not something you can say about a proprietary database inside an app. The second is redundancy — a phone can be lost, dropped in a river, or simply replaced. A folder of GPX files is a backup that does not depend on any company staying in business.

If you record often, a periodic full-history export is worth more than exporting one route at a time. TrailCam can write the entire history to a single GPX file, or to a CSV summary, in one action.