How to import a GPX file into Organic Maps

The short answer

On an iPhone, find the .gpx file — in Files, in an email, or from the share action of the app that recorded it — tap the share icon, and choose Organic Maps from the row of apps iOS offers. Organic Maps opens, reads the file, and draws the track on the map. There is no website or desktop version of Organic Maps to import through instead; the share sheet on the phone is the way this happens.

Where the GPX file comes from in the first place

Organic Maps only has a track it has been handed as a file — it does not record hikes of its own the way a GPS tracker does. 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 Organic Maps and most other services expect.

Getting it into Organic Maps

From the share sheet on iPhone

This is the only path, and it is a short one. Open the .gpx file from wherever it is sitting, tap the share icon, and look for Organic Maps among the apps offered. Tapping it hands the file straight to Organic Maps, which opens on its own and adds the track without any further steps.

Bookmarks and tracks, not activities

An imported GPX file lands on a screen Organic Maps calls Bookmarks and Tracks, alongside any pins you have placed yourself. That name is a hint about how the app thinks about it: a track is something to look at on the map and navigate by, filed next to your saved places, not an entry in a history of hikes you have completed. Organic Maps has no separate activity log to sort it into.

What Organic Maps does with the file once it arrives

Organic Maps draws the track on top of its own offline map data and lets you follow it, whether or not you have a connection at the time — that offline-first behaviour is the whole reason the app exists. What it does not do is recompute the hike the way a fitness-oriented service might: there is no separate elevation model correcting the file's altitude values, no recalculated distance figure presented as an activity summary, no comparison against other times you have walked the same trail. The track is treated as a line to navigate by, not a performance to measure.

Anything the GPX format has no field for does not travel with it either. Photos, video clips and voice notes captured during the original walk live outside the file, so the import brings the shape of the route across and nothing more.

Things that go wrong, and why

• Organic Maps does not show up in the share sheet — this usually means the file extension has changed. Some email clients rewrite a .gpx attachment as .txt or strip the extension entirely, which stops iOS from offering apps that handle the format.
• The track appears with no elevation shading — Organic Maps is reading whatever altitude values the file carried; if the source file has none, there is nothing to shade the line with, and this is a property of the file, not something Organic Maps failed to compute.
• Looking for the imported track in a history or activity list and not finding one — there is no such list. Bookmarks and Tracks is the only place an imported route lives in this app.
• Expecting distance or duration figures next to the track the way an activity-tracking app would show them — Organic Maps is a navigation app built on map data, and it does not present a GPX import as a completed activity with computed stats.

Where TrailCam fits in

TrailCam records the route on an iPhone with the distance, moving time, pace and elevation gain already worked out, and exports it as GPX 1.1 or CSV, either for a single walk or the whole history at once — the file this entire process starts from. Export is part of the optional TrailCam Pro upgrade; the app itself is free to download. Getting that file into Organic Maps afterwards is a way to carry a hike onto an offline map for a future trip, not a way to see numbers a fitness log would show — those already came from the app that recorded the walk.