GPX files for motorcyclists: import, export and why they matter

GPX is unglamorous, and it is the single most important feature in any route planner: it is the thing that makes a route you built actually yours.

Here is what is in one, the distinction that causes almost every import problem, and how to use it well.

What a GPX file actually is

Open one in a text editor and you will find XML — human-readable tags with coordinates in them. That is all it is. No proprietary encoding, no licence, no vendor.

It can contain three kinds of thing, and mixing them up is where the trouble starts:

Waypoints (wpt) — individual named points. A fuel stop, a lookout, a meeting place. Standalone pins, not a route.

Routes (rte) — an ordered list of points to navigate to. A route typically has a handful to a few dozen points. The navigating device works out the roads between them, which means the route can be recalculated if you deviate.

Tracks (trk) — a dense recording of where something actually went. A recorded ride is a track, and it might contain thousands of points at one-second intervals, each with a timestamp and often an elevation.

The distinction that breaks imports

Nearly every “my GPX imported wrong” problem is this one.

A route is instructions: go via these points. Small, flexible, re-routable. If you miss a turn, the device recalculates.

A track is history: here is exactly where the line goes. Large, rigid, not really navigable — some devices will follow a track as a line without turn instructions, and if you deviate they cannot recalculate, because there is nothing to recalculate from.

So when someone sends you “the GPX for Sunday” and it is a track exported from their recorded ride, and you import it expecting turn-by-turn, you get a line on the map and no instructions. Nothing is broken. It is the wrong kind of file for the job.

What to send for a ride you want people to navigate: a route, or a simplified track converted to a route with a sane number of waypoints.

What to send for “here is where I went”: a track.

Waypoint limits, the other common failure

Dedicated GPS units in particular have limits on how many waypoints a route can contain — often a few dozen. Import a 500-point route and the device either refuses, truncates it silently, or splits it into several routes with unhelpful names.

If your route needs to survive a transfer to an unknown device:

• Keep it under about 25 waypoints where possible.
• Put waypoints where they decide something — junctions where the route could plausibly go two ways — not evenly spaced along a straight road.
• Name them usefully. “Fuel — Narbethong” is worth a great deal more than “WPT023” at the side of the road.

A well-placed 15-waypoint route reproduces faithfully on almost any device. A 400-point one is a lottery.

Practical workflows

Plan somewhere, ride somewhere else

Perfectly reasonable, and common. Build the route in whichever planner you like best, export GPX, import it into the app or unit you actually navigate with. Nothing is lost as long as you export a route rather than a track. We recommend this combination explicitly for riders who love one planner’s controls but want free navigation.

Share a route with a mixed group

Not everyone in a group uses the same app, and this is where GPX stops being a technicality. Export once, send it to the group chat, and every rider imports it into whatever they use. Do it the night before — car parks are a terrible place to debug file formats.

Our group ride guide covers why every rider having the route matters more than the leader knowing the way.

Archive your good routes

Apps change, pricing changes, phones die. A folder of GPX files in your cloud storage is a permanent, vendor-neutral copy of every route you have built. It takes seconds per route and it is the only genuine insurance against an app you rely on changing its terms.

Turn a recorded ride into a repeatable route

You rode somewhere brilliant, mostly by accident, and want to do it again. Export the ride as a track, import it into a planner that can convert it into an editable route, then trim the wrong turns and the fuel detour. What comes out is the ride you meant to do.

What GPX does not carry

Worth knowing, so you are not surprised:

• Your routing preferences. Curviness settings, avoid rules and vehicle profile do not travel. The importing app applies its own model between waypoints, which is why the same GPX can produce slightly different roads in different apps.
• Turn instructions. These are generated by the navigating device, not stored in the file.
• Anything app-specific. Notes, photos, your ridden-roads state, group details.

If exact reproduction matters — for a rally or an organised ride — send a route with enough waypoints to pin the roads down, and say which roads matter in the description.

The one thing to check before you commit to any app

Can you get a GPX out, free, without a subscription?

If yes, you can leave whenever you like and your routes come with you. If no, every hour you spend building routes is an hour of lock-in. It is the cheapest possible test of whether an app treats your work as yours, and it takes thirty seconds to check.