GPX Viewer: Read Tracks, Routes and Waypoints

Apps
All tools
Report

Heading to the field? Install this site from your browser menu and this tool works with no signal. See how

Converter

Nothing is uploaded. The file is converted on your own device, so it works with no signal.

Drop a file here or

Nothing leaves your device.

No file to hand?

Waiting for a file.

Features in this file

NameTypeFolderVerticesLengthArea

Three panels explaining what a GPX file can hold. The first shows wpt, waypoints, single positions marked deliberately such as a trailhead or a summit cairn, which become points. The second shows rte, a planned route, a short list of turning points, which becomes a line. The third shows trk, a recorded track sampled every second or two, drawn as two curved segments with a dashed red gap between them labelled gap, which becomes a multi segment line. A band below explains that the gap between two segments means the recorder stopped, and joining them draws a straight line across ground never crossed. A second band notes that GPX writes latitude first as attributes while KML writes longitude first as text.
The dashed red gap is the detail worth noticing. Software that treats it as a mistake and joins the segments inflates the distance, in the sample on this page by just over 40 percent.

How to use this tool

Drop a .gpx file on the panel above, or press Choose a file. The file is read on your own device, so a season of recorded rides opens as fast as your disk can supply it and the page keeps working with no signal. Press Load a sample if you want to see the output before finding a file.

Everything in the file is drawn on the map and listed in the table underneath, with lengths worked out for anything linear. Use the filter box if the file has hundreds of waypoints in it. If you want the data somewhere else, the button gives you GeoJSON, and the export row at the bottom gives you the map as an image or the table as a CSV.

The three things a GPX file can hold

People say GPX as though it means one thing. It holds three, and most software shows you one of them.

A waypoint, written as wpt, is a single position somebody marked deliberately. A trailhead, a gate, a water source. It can carry a name, a description and a height.

A route, written as rte, is where you intend to go. It is a short list of turning points, usually a few dozen at most, and a device can navigate along it turn by turn.

A track, written as trk, is where you actually went. A recorder samples your position every second or two, so a ninety minute ride is around five thousand points. A track is not for navigating, it is a record.

The distinction matters because a device treats them completely differently. Load a track into a unit expecting a route and it may refuse it, or truncate it to the first few hundred points. If a file will not load onto your GPS, check which of the three it actually contains, which the table above tells you directly.

Why one track can appear as several lines

A track is divided into segments, written as trkseg. A recorder starts a new segment whenever it stops and starts again: you paused for lunch, went through a tunnel, lost signal in a valley, or changed a battery.

The gap between two segments is information. It says the recorder was not running, and nobody knows what happened in between. Joining the segments into one continuous line draws a straight edge across ground you may never have crossed, and adds its length to your total.

This tool keeps them apart, which is why the table above can show one track as a multi segment line, and why the total length is the sum of the segments rather than the distance from first point to last.

A worked check you can repeat on paper

Press Load a sample and look at the recorded track. It has two segments, and you can add them up yourself from the coordinates.

  • Segment one runs through three points and measures 20.225 km: a first leg of 9.118 km and a second of 11.108 km.
  • Segment two runs through two points and measures 14.655 km.
  • The track is therefore 20.225 plus 14.655, which is 34.880 km.

Now do it the wrong way. Join the segments by drawing a line from the last point of the first to the first point of the second. That connecting line is 14.108 km of ground the recorder never saw, and adding it gives 48.988 km.

That is a 40.4 percent overstatement, on a file where nothing looks broken and no software complains. It is the single largest source of wrong distances in recorded track data, and it comes entirely from a piece of software deciding a gap was a mistake rather than a fact.

Lengths here use the Vincenty inverse solution on the WGS84 ellipsoid, which is the same method a survey grade instrument uses. A flat calculation treating degrees as a grid would be wrong by roughly the cosine of your latitude, which at 55 degrees north is a 43 percent error on anything running east to west.

How to open a GPX file without installing anything

A GPX file is plain XML text, so you can open one in any text editor and read it. That is useful for checking a header or a creator string, and useless for anything else, because five thousand coordinate lines tell you nothing about where you went.

This page is the practical answer: it draws the file, measures it, lists what is in it, and hands it back in another format if you need one. Nothing is uploaded, so you are not handing your movement history to a website in order to look at it, which is worth caring about with location data more than with most file types.

Mistakes that catch people out

Assuming an empty map means a broken file. If the file holds only a route and your software shows tracks, you get an empty map from a perfectly good file. The table above lists everything regardless of type.

Comparing a track distance against a route distance. They measure different things. The route in the sample is 48.771 km and the recorded track is 34.880 km, and neither is wrong. One is the plan, the other is what was recorded before the battery died.

Trusting a total that joined the segments. Covered above, and worth checking whenever a distance looks generous.

Expecting elevation to be reliable. The ele element usually holds a GPS derived height, which is measured from the WGS84 ellipsoid and can sit tens of metres away from sea level. Barometric units are better but drift with the weather. Treat GPX elevation as indicative unless you know what recorded it.

Forgetting that a GPX carries a timestamped record of your movements. Before sending one to anybody, consider whether the time element is in there, because it usually is, and it shows exactly when you were where.

Related Calculators and Reference

Once you can see what is in the file, the next step is usually getting it into something else.