How to import a GPX file into Ride with GPS

The short answer

On the Ride with GPS website, sign in and look for the upload action, usually reachable from your dashboard or your list of routes. Choose the .gpx file from your computer and it builds a line on the map from the points inside it.

On an iPhone, the shorter path usually runs the other way: open the app that recorded the ride, use its share or export action, and choose Ride with GPS from the row of apps iOS offers. That hands the file to the Ride with GPS app directly, without a browser involved at all.

Where the GPX file comes from in the first place

Ride with GPS only has whatever it has been given — a ride recorded in its own app, or a file handed over from somewhere else. A GPS recorder writes the points it logged, latitude, longitude, elevation and usually a timestamp for each, into a single .gpx file through its export or share action. TrailCam can export a single ride or an entire history this way, in GPX 1.1, which is the version Ride with GPS and most other cycling and mapping tools expect.

Getting it into Ride with GPS

From the Ride with GPS website

Sign in, find the upload option, and pick a .gpx file from your computer. The file is read point by point and drawn onto the map, and you land on a page where you can rename it, save it, or start adjusting the line.

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 Ride with GPS among the apps offered. Tapping it passes the file straight to the app.

Route or trip

Ride with GPS keeps a planned line and a completed ride as different kinds of thing, usually called a route and a trip. A file that carries timestamps for its points, the kind a recording app produces, is the sort of file that can be read as something you already rode rather than something you are only planning. If the ride already happened and it lands the wrong way, look for the option to reclassify it once the import finishes rather than assuming it landed correctly.

What Ride with GPS does with the file once it arrives

Distance is worked out from the coordinates in the file itself, not copied from any summary number the original app may have written into it. Elevation gain can also be recalculated from Ride with GPS's own terrain data rather than the per-point elevation the file carried, so a climb total that differs slightly from the app that recorded the ride is ordinary, not a sign of an error on either side.

Photos, video clips and voice notes captured on the original ride are not part of this at all. GPX has no field for embedded media, so only the shape of the route travels across on import — anything you filmed or recorded along the way stays wherever it was captured.

Things that go wrong, and why

• The upload is rejected as empty — usually the file has too few points, for example a recording that stopped moments after it started.
• The ride lands as a route rather than a trip — check whether the file actually carried timestamps; a track with no per-point time looks, to the importer, like a plan rather than something already ridden.
• Elevation looks different from what the recording app reported — expected if Ride with GPS filled it in from its own terrain model instead of the file's own values.
• Nothing happens when the file is tapped on iPhone — check the extension is still .gpx. Some email clients quietly 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 ride recorded in one app can go on to have a working life somewhere else, and bringing a ride from a recording app into Ride with GPS is an ordinary case of that. The file is what carries the real shape of the route across — not a screenshot, not a distance typed from memory.

TrailCam records the route on an iPhone in the background and exports it as GPX 1.1 or CSV, either for a single ride 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.