How to import a GPX file into Outdooractive
Outdooractive is not only a place to log your own walks â the same map carries official routes published by tourism boards, alpine clubs and park authorities, sitting alongside whatever a member has recorded or planned. A GPX file you bring in becomes a Tour, the one word Outdooractive uses for practically anything with a line on the map. Here is where the import lives and what it does and does not carry with it.
The short answer
On the Outdooractive website, open the route planner and look for an import or upload option â usually reachable from the same screen used to start planning a new tour from scratch â and choose the .gpx file. Outdooractive reads the points and lays them onto its map as a Tour you can view, adjust or save.
On an iPhone, the more direct route is the other way round: open the app that recorded the walk, use its share or export action, and choose Outdooractive from the row of apps iOS offers. That hands the file to the Outdooractive app without a website involved at all.
Why Outdooractive treats an import a little differently
Most services people bring a GPX file into fall cleanly into one of two camps: a social feed of completed activities, like Strava, or a planning tool for routes not yet walked, like a paper map replacement. Outdooractive sits across both, on purpose. The same platform hosts curated tours written by a regional tourism board, routes shared by other members, and a personal history of what one person has actually walked â and calls all three a Tour, whether it started as somebody else's plan or as your own GPS recording.
A GPX import lands inside that same single bucket. It does not get sorted into a separate "my activities" area the way an upload to a pure activity tracker would; it becomes a Tour like any other, which is worth knowing before assuming it will behave exactly like an import into a service built around one job only.
Getting the file in
From the Outdooractive website
Sign in, open the route planner, and use its import action to pick a .gpx file from your computer. Outdooractive builds a Tour from the points and drops you into the planner or editor view, where a title, a description and other details can be filled in before it is saved.
From an iPhone, through the share sheet
Find the .gpx file â in Files, in an email, or from the share action of the app that produced it â tap the share icon, and look for Outdooractive among the apps offered. Tapping it hands the file straight to the Outdooractive app.
What actually lands, and what does not
A GPX track â an ordered, timestamped sequence of coordinates â comes in as the line of the Tour. Distance is worked out from those coordinates, and elevation gain can be recalculated from Outdooractive's own terrain data rather than taken as-is from whatever the file carried, which is why a climb total on Outdooractive does not always match the number the recording app reported for the same walk â the same pattern found across nearly every service that layers its own terrain model under an imported track.
What does not come across is anything outside the coordinate data. Photos, video clips and voice notes captured on the original walk have no field to travel in inside a GPX file, so they stay behind as separate files â the import brings the shape of the route, not what was captured along it.
Things that trip people up
- The import is rejected as empty â usually the file has too few points, for example a recording stopped seconds after it started.
- The Tour looks right but the elevation profile seems off â Outdooractive may have substituted its own terrain-model elevation for the values the file carried, which is a different data source, not a broken import.
- The imported Tour reads like a suggested route rather than a record of a completed walk â expected on a platform built around Tours in general, and usually a label that can be changed after the fact rather than a fixed outcome.
- Nothing offers to open the file on iPhone â check the extension is still .gpx. Some email clients rewrite attachments as .txt, and iOS will not list Outdooractive as an option for that.
Where TrailCam fits in
TrailCam records a route with GPS on an iPhone and exports it as GPX 1.1 or CSV, for a single walk or the whole history at once â the format Outdooractive, along with Strava, Garmin Connect and most mapping tools, reads directly. Export is part of the optional TrailCam Pro upgrade; the app itself is free to download.
Questions
- Does importing a GPX file into Outdooractive bring my photos and voice notes with it?
- No. GPX is a coordinate format with no field for embedded media. Photos, video clips and voice notes stay outside the file; only the track geometry comes across on import.
- Why does Outdooractive show different elevation gain than the app that recorded the hike?
- Outdooractive can recalculate elevation gain from its own terrain data instead of using the per-point elevation values inside the GPX file, so a difference from the original app is ordinary rather than a sign either number is wrong.
- Does an imported GPX automatically count as a completed hike rather than a planned route?
- Not reliably. GPX has no field stating whether a track is a plan or something already walked, and Outdooractive treats both as a Tour, so it is worth checking how the import was classified rather than assuming.
Recording your own routes
TrailCam is an iPhone app that records your route with GPS, keeps video clips, photos and voice notes pinned to the spot where you took them, and exports the result as GPX 1.1 or CSV. It is free to download.