How to open a GPX file on a computer

The short answer

A GPX file is plain text — XML — so nothing about it requires a dedicated app. A text editor opens it and shows the raw structure; a web browser opens it too, showing the same tags rather than a map; a mapping tool built to read GPX, such as Google Earth Pro, opens it directly with no conversion step and draws the route as a line over terrain. Which one is worth using depends on whether the goal is to see the route on a map, or to check what is actually inside the file.

What each kind of "open" actually shows

A text editor

Opening a GPX file in a plain text editor — Notepad, TextEdit, anything that reads .txt — shows the file exactly as it is: a block of XML tags, each recorded point sitting inside its own element with a latitude, longitude and usually an elevation and a timestamp attached. Nothing gets drawn. This is the right tool when the question is about the file itself rather than the route — whether it actually has track points, whether the timestamps look sane, whether a hand edit landed where it was supposed to.

A web browser

Most browsers open a .gpx file directly instead of downloading it, since it is just text with a .gpx extension rather than .xml. What shows up is the same raw tag structure as a text editor, sometimes with basic syntax colouring, but still no map — a browser has no built-in idea of how to turn a GPX file into a line unless it is pointed at a page built specifically to do that.

A mapping tool built to read GPX

Google Earth Pro opens a GPX file directly with no conversion step, plotting the track as a line over its own satellite imagery and terrain. This is the option that actually answers "what does this route look like," and it is also the heaviest of the three to have installed just to check one file.

The quickest way to just see the route on a map

For a single look at a route with nothing installed, a free browser-based GPX viewer is usually the fastest path: drop the file in, and it draws the track over a web map immediately, with no account and nothing left behind afterward. That is worth reaching for before anything heavier when the only question is what the route looked like, not what to do with the file next.

Why the raw view is sometimes what you actually want

Reading the raw tags is not just a fallback for when no map tool is handy — it answers a different question than a map does. A file that failed to import somewhere else, a track that looks suspiciously short, an edit made by hand that might have broken the syntax: all of these are easier to check by reading the actual structure than by looking at a line on a map, where a missing section or a malformed point tends to just look like a gap rather than explain itself.

Things that trip people up

• Double-clicking the file on Windows or Mac and nothing opens — there is often no default app associated with .gpx, since it is a specialist format rather than one every operating system ships a viewer for. Opening it manually from inside a browser or a text editor works even when double-clicking does not.
• The file opens in a browser but shows walls of angle-bracket tags instead of a map — that is the correct, working behaviour for a plain browser tab. A map only appears on a page built specifically to read and draw GPX data.
• An emailed .gpx file opens as unreadable text or refuses to open at all — some mail clients rewrite the attachment as .xml or .txt on the way through, which is enough to stop an operating system offering the right options for it.
• A file that opens fine but shows no track — check whether it actually contains a continuous track or only standalone waypoints; a file built purely from marked locations has no line to draw.

Where TrailCam fits in

A route recorded in TrailCam exports as GPX 1.1 or CSV, for a single walk or the whole history at once, as part of the optional TrailCam Pro upgrade — the app itself is free to download. Because a GPX export is plain text, everything above about opening one on a computer applies to it directly: it opens in a browser or a text editor with no TrailCam installation involved, and reads cleanly into Google Earth Pro or into Strava, Garmin Connect and Komoot the same way any other GPX file does.