How to import a GPX file into AllTrails

The short answer

Look for an import or upload option wherever AllTrails lets you build or edit a map — on the website this sits inside its custom map tools, and in the app it is usually reachable from the same place you would start recording or creating a route. Menu wording moves around in an app that updates often, so "import," "upload," and "add a route" are all worth trying if the exact label has shifted since this was written.

Either way, the file itself does the same job it does everywhere else: a .gpx exported from a recording app hands over the coordinates, and AllTrails draws them as a line on its map.

Where the GPX file comes from in the first place

AllTrails only has a route that was either recorded with the AllTrails app itself or handed over as a file from somewhere else. Most GPS recorders have an export or share action that writes the points logged — latitude, longitude, elevation and a timestamp for each — into a single .gpx file. TrailCam can export a single route or an entire history this way, in GPX 1.1, which is the version AllTrails and most other services expect.

What an import turns into

This is the part worth pausing on. Strava and Garmin Connect are built around logging something you already did, so a GPX import lands in your history as a completed activity by default. AllTrails is built as much around finding and following trails as recording them, and an imported route commonly becomes a custom map — something to navigate by — rather than an entry that reads as a hike you have already finished. If the goal was to log a past walk rather than save a route to follow again, check where the import actually landed before assuming it behaved the same way it would elsewhere.

Neither behaviour is wrong, they just answer different questions: "where did I go" versus "where do I want to go next."

Things that go wrong, and why

• The import is rejected as empty — usually the file has too few points, for example a recording that stopped seconds after it started.
• The route lands as a map to follow rather than a record of a walk you already did, or the other way round — a matter of which import path was used, not a fault in the file itself.
• Elevation looks different from the app that recorded it — AllTrails can apply its own terrain data on import rather than using the elevation values the file carried, so a different climb total reflects a different data source, not an error.
• Nothing happens when the file is tapped on iPhone — check the extension is still .gpx. Some email clients rewrite attachments as .txt, which stops iOS from offering apps that handle the format.

Why the file is what actually moves

GPX exists so a route recorded in one app can have a second life in another, and bringing a hike from a recording app into AllTrails is an ordinary version of that. Keeping the GPX file as the thing that travels between them — rather than a screenshot of a summary screen or a number typed from memory — is what keeps the real shape of the walk intact once it lands somewhere else. Anything the format has no field for does not travel with it either: photos, video clips and voice notes captured along the original route stay outside the file, so an import brings the shape of the walk across, not the moments recorded on it.

TrailCam records the route on an iPhone and exports it as GPX 1.1 or CSV, either for a single walk or the whole history at once, which is the file this entire process starts from. Export is part of the optional TrailCam Pro upgrade; the app itself is free to download.