The tags tell the reader (whether a GPS unit or computer) what information is contained between it. Each piece of information in a GPX file is surrounded by tags. GPS Units just look for the XML language in the file and don’t care about the whitespace, although most programs will save it with the indentations to make it easier for humans to work with. Sometimes programs remove all the white space from the GPX file to reduce the file size. If you open a GPX file with a text editor and it’s not formatted nicely like this or is all on one line, just cut and past it into a tool like and XML formatter, process it, and then paste it back to your file. The XML data is indented just like our bulleted list is, and has the same information, but just in the XML format. Instead of plain text like the last image, the GPX file is written in XML (eXtensible Markup Language). Information that is indented belongs to the higher level bullet point. Think of the GPX file like a bulleted outline containing your GPS information. The GPX file was specified in the text format so that any type of device could easily open and read it without a fuss. There are also more sophisticated tools that offer mapping and are easier to work with, and I’ll talk about those later.

You can open a GPX file with any text editor or word processor. If you open up a GPX file, you’ll see that it’s simply a text file. It might look crazy now, but if you know what to look for, you’ll be able to decode it and understand what you’re looking at. What’s in a GPX File? Here’s what a GPX file looks like if you open it up. Leave a comment and I will do my best to respond.

Have a question about the hike or want to see what other people are saying/asking? View the Youtube comments for this video.

Open gpx file app