How to import a GPX file into Komoot

The short answer

On the Komoot website, open the route planner, look for the import option near the top of the page, and choose the .gpx file from your computer. Komoot reads the points and draws them onto the map as a route you can view, follow, or adjust like any other.

On an iPhone, the more common path is from the other direction: open the app that recorded the walk, use its share or export action, and choose Komoot from the row of apps iOS offers. That hands the file straight to Komoot without opening a browser at all.

Where the GPX file comes from in the first place

Komoot only has a route it has been given, either recorded in Komoot 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 Komoot and most other services expect.

Getting it into Komoot

From the Komoot website

Sign in, open the planner, and use the import action to pick a .gpx file from your computer. Komoot builds a route from the points and drops you into the planner view, where you can rename it, save it, or start adjusting the line before you go anywhere.

From an iPhone, through the share sheet

Find the .gpx file — in Files, in an email, or from the share action of the app that produced it — tap the share icon, and look for Komoot among the apps offered. Tapping it hands the file to Komoot's app directly.

Route or activity

Because Komoot leans toward planning, an imported GPX often lands as a route to follow rather than an activity you already completed. If the walk already happened and you want it in your history as something you did, look for that distinction when the import finishes rather than assuming it landed the way you expected.

What Komoot does with the file once it arrives

Komoot recalculates rather than trusting a summary figure baked into the file, because a GPX track carries the raw points, not a finished total. Distance comes from the coordinates themselves, and elevation gain can be recomputed from Komoot's own terrain data rather than the elevation values the original file carried, which is why the climb total on Komoot is not always identical to the number the recording app reported.

Komoot also adds things a GPX file never had in the first place, such as a surface type or a difficulty rating for the route. Those come from Komoot's own map data laid under your line, not from anything encoded in the import. Photos, video clips and voice notes captured on the original walk stay outside the file entirely, since GPX has no field for embedded media — only the shape of the route travels across.

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 looks fine but has no useful elevation — some GPX files omit elevation per point; Komoot can often fill this in from its own terrain model, but the result is Komoot's estimate, not a measurement from your walk.
• The imported route lands as a plan rather than a completed activity — expected behavior for a service built around route planning, and usually adjustable after the fact.
• 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 working life in another, and bringing a hike from a recording app into Komoot's planner is an ordinary version of that. Keeping the GPX file as the thing that travels between them, rather than a screenshot or a number typed from memory, is what keeps the real shape of the walk intact once it lands somewhere else.

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.