How to import a GPX file into YAMAP

The short answer

The way in is YAMAP's route-planning tool on yamap.com, not the iPhone app itself. Sign in on the website, open route creation, and look for an option to bring in a GPX file rather than draw the route by hand point by point. That turns the file into a plan you can open later, which is a different thing from an activity you record while you are actually out walking.

Where the GPX file comes from in the first place

A GPX file only exists because something recorded the walk and wrote the points down — latitude, longitude, elevation, and usually a timestamp on each one. Most GPS recorders have an export or share action that does exactly this. TrailCam can export a single route or an entire history this way, in GPX 1.1, which is the version most mapping and planning tools expect.

Getting it into YAMAP

Through the website, not the app

This is the part that trips people up, because it is the opposite of how import usually works on a phone. There is no point sharing a .gpx file to the YAMAP app the way you would to Gaia GPS or Avenza — it will not show up as an option. The file has to be uploaded from a computer, or from a phone's browser, on yamap.com's route-planning page.

Getting the plan back onto your phone

Once a route is built on the website from the imported file, it sits under your account and syncs down to the YAMAP app the way any planned route does. From there the usual step for a mountain with patchy signal applies: download the map area for that route ahead of time, so the plan and the terrain underneath it are both sitting on the phone before you lose a connection.

What actually lands, and what it turns into

An imported GPX file becomes a planned route on YAMAP — a line to follow on the map, with a distance and elevation profile drawn from it — not a completed activity with your original pace or moving time attached. That distinction matters here more than it does in most import guides: YAMAP treats "a route someone drew or recorded" and "an activity you record live" as two different kinds of thing, and an import only ever produces the first one.

Anything the GPX format has no field for stays behind. Photos, video clips and voice notes captured on the original walk live outside the file entirely, so bringing a track into YAMAP carries the shape of the route across, not the moments recorded along the way.

Things that trip people up

• Looking for YAMAP in the iPhone share sheet and not finding it — that is expected. The import lives on the website, not as a share-sheet destination.
• Expecting the imported route to show up in your activity history with a pace or a moving time — it will not, because it was never recorded live; it is a plan, and plans do not carry those numbers.
• Elevation looking a little different from what the original recording app reported — worth checking rather than assuming an error, since planning tools built around their own maps can substitute their own terrain reading for the raw values a file carries.
• Assuming the map area is already downloaded for offline use just because the route is on the phone — the route and the underlying map tiles are separate downloads, and only the plan syncs automatically.

Why bring a track into YAMAP at all

The two apps are good at different halves of the same walk. YAMAP's strength is the map itself — detailed offline coverage of mountain trails to actually navigate by. A GPS recorder is better at capturing what a walk actually was: the exact line taken, and anything worth keeping along the way. Moving a GPX file from one to the other is a way of using each for what it does best, rather than picking only one.

TrailCam records a route on an iPhone the whole time you are out, and exports it as GPX 1.1 or CSV, either for a single walk or your entire history — the file this whole process starts from. Export is part of the optional TrailCam Pro upgrade; the app itself is free to download.