How to import a GPX file into Trailforks

The short answer

Open Trailforks, or the Trailforks app, sign in, and use its ride upload option to bring in the .gpx file from Files or iCloud Drive. The track is read as a line and matched against the trail network for the region it falls in, then saved to your ride log. On an iPhone, sharing a .gpx file to the Trailforks app from the Files app, or from the share sheet of the app that recorded it, does the same thing without a browser involved.

Why Trailforks works differently from a personal activity feed

Strava, Ride with GPS and most recording apps treat a GPX upload as belonging to one account, sitting in one person's history, compared against nothing but that person's own past rides. Trailforks is organised the other way round, around the trails themselves — a region has its own map, made of individually named, mapped trail segments, and a ride is shown as a path across that shared network rather than as a standalone line on a blank background. Uploading a GPX there is closer to reporting where you actually rode within a map that already exists than to creating a new map from scratch.

That is also why a Trailforks import can behave differently from a plain mapping tool: the track gets checked against nearby named trails as well as drawn, and how closely it follows an existing trail can affect how the ride is logged.

Getting the file in

From the iPhone share sheet

A .gpx file sitting in Files, attached to an email, or produced straight out of the export action of the app that recorded it can be shared to the Trailforks app through the iOS share sheet, and it lands as a ride without leaving the app you started in.

From inside Trailforks

Trailforks also has its own upload option, reachable from your ride log, that reads a .gpx file directly from Files or iCloud Drive. Either route ends with the same result: a ride entry built from the track, sitting on the trail map for that region.

What actually lands, and what does not

A GPX track — an ordered, timestamped sequence of points — comes in as a ride, matched as closely as possible to the trails it crosses on the map. Distance and elevation gain for that ride are worked out from the imported points, the same way any GPS platform derives them, so a total that differs slightly from the app that recorded the ride is ordinary rather than a sign of an error.

What does not come across is anything outside the coordinate data. Photos, video clips and voice notes recorded along the ride are separate files with no field for them in GPX, so none of that travels with the import — the ride log shows the shape of where you rode, not what you captured on the way.

Things that trip people up

• The ride shows as riding "off trail" for stretches that felt like a marked route — the trail network on Trailforks is built and maintained by contributors, and a real trail can simply be missing or mapped slightly differently from where the GPS points actually fell.
• Only part of the ride matches known trails — normal on a route that connects trailheads by road, fire access, or unmapped singletrack; the imported line still shows the full ride regardless of how much of it lines up with named trails.
• Nothing offers to open the file on the phone — check the extension is still .gpx. Some email clients quietly rewrite attachments as .txt, which stops iOS from offering the Trailforks app for it.
• Elevation gain looks different from the number the recording app showed — expected if Trailforks recalculates it from its own terrain data rather than the per-point elevation the file carried.

Where TrailCam fits in

TrailCam records a route with GPS on an iPhone, in the background whether the screen is on or off, and exports it as GPX 1.1 or CSV, for a single ride or the whole history at once — the format Trailforks, along with Strava, Garmin Connect and Komoot, reads directly. Export is part of the optional TrailCam Pro upgrade; the app itself is free to download.