How to Create a GPX Route: A Step-by-Step Guide

There's a particular kind of satisfaction in following a line you drew yourself. When you create a GPX route from scratch, you choose the trailhead, the viewpoint, the café stop and the way home, instead of inheriting someone else's day. It also means the mistakes are yours, so it's worth doing properly.

We already have a quick six-step version for when you just need a file. This post is the long one. We'll walk through a full plan in the TrailX Route Composer, explain what each number on screen is telling you, compare two versions of the same day, export the GPX and get it onto your phone. Then we'll cover the part most guides skip: checking the file before you trust it with your afternoon.

Drawing a route vs recording one

Before we start clicking, it helps to know which kind of GPX you actually need. There are two ways to end up with one:

• Drawn (planned): you place points on a map and a routing engine connects them along real paths and roads. The result is a clean line with elevation, but no timestamps, because nobody has walked it yet.
• Recorded: you carry a GPS and it logs where you went, point by point, with time attached. The TrailX app does this with pause/resume and categorised waypoints for things like water crossings, camps and fuel.

Drawn routes are for going somewhere new. Recorded tracks are the truth about what happened: the detour around a fallen tree, the spot where the path really goes, how long it really took. Many of us do both. We draw the plan at home, follow it on the day, record as we go, and publish the recording if it turned out to be a good one. If you want a refresher on what's actually inside the file, what is a GPX file? covers tracks, routes and waypoints.

How to create a GPX route in the Route Composer

Here's the full walkthrough. For the example, picture a hiking day in the hills: park in a village, climb to a viewpoint, drop down to a hut for lunch and loop back to the car.

1. Choose the profile first

Open the Composer and pick how you'll travel before you place a single point. There are four profiles, and each one routes over a different network:

Picking the wrong profile is the most common reason a plan looks odd. A hiking line that suddenly follows a long road detour is often a hint that you're on the wrong profile, or that the path you wanted isn't connected in the map data.

2. Place your start, via and end stops

Click the map to drop your start. Then click again for each place the route must pass, and finally for the finish. You can add as many stops as you like, and the Composer fills in their names for you, which makes the list easy to read later.

A few habits keep the line clean:

• Use as few stops as you can. Put them only where the route has to go a particular way: a bridge, a pass, the hut, the viewpoint. Let the router handle everything in between.
• Drop stops on the path, not beside it. A point placed in a meadow might snap to a different track than the one you meant.
• Close the loop. For a circular day, make the last stop the car park so the file ends where it started.

For our hike, that's four stops: village, viewpoint, hut, village. Planning a longer trip by car with lots of stops? We go deeper on that in the multi-stop road trip planner post.

3. Read the elevation profile

Once the route is drawn, the elevation profile appears below the map. This is where a plan stops being a line and starts being a day. Look for where the climbing sits, not just how much there is. 600 m spread over 12 km is a pleasant walk. The same 600 m packed into the first 3 km is a different morning entirely.

For a sense of scale, compare your plan with real trails. The Gössler Alm Hike in Styria climbs 1,205 m in just 6.5 km and is rated Hard. The Kahlenberg Hike in Vienna is 2.1 km with 90 m of ascent and rated Easy. If your homemade route looks more like the first one, plan for it. Our guide on how to read an elevation profile turns that chart into a time estimate and a turnaround plan.

4. Check the weather along the route

The Composer shows weather along the route, not just at the start. That matters more than it sounds: a valley start can be calm and warm while the ridge you'll be on at midday is windy and cold. Use it to decide which direction to walk the loop, and whether the high point should come early or late.

While you're there, switch on the terrain relief (hillshade) or 3D terrain to see the shape of the ground, and check the points of interest along the route for anything useful near your line.

5. Compare A vs B

This is the step we'd skip least. Most days have two sensible options: the ridge or the valley, clockwise or anticlockwise, the long gentle approach or the short steep one. The Composer lets you compare two routes side by side, so you can see distance, climbing and profile shape next to each other instead of guessing.

For our hike, version A climbs straight to the viewpoint and drops to the hut. Version B goes to the hut first and climbs to the viewpoint after lunch. Same stops, same total climb, very different afternoon. Seeing both profiles together usually makes the choice obvious.

A plan is just a guess about the future. Comparing two plans is the cheapest way to make it a better guess.

6. Export the GPX

Happy with the line? Exporting is free, but you'll need to sign in to a free TrailX account. The download is a standard GPX file with your routed line, elevation on each point and your stops as waypoints, so it opens in almost any outdoor app or GPS device.

If another app wants KML, GeoJSON or TCX instead, run the file through the free format converter. It works in your browser, and our GPX converter post explains which format suits which app.

Get it onto your phone or GPS

A GPX on your laptop doesn't help much on a ridge. The step-by-step for both platforms lives in GPX on iPhone and Android, but the short version:

1. Send the file to your phone (email, cloud drive or AirDrop).
2. Open it with the TrailX app or your navigation app of choice. The TrailX app imports GPX, KML, KMZ, GeoJSON, TCX and CSV.
3. Download the regional map and the route for offline use while you still have signal.
4. Start navigation once at home to make sure it loads, then again at the trailhead.

The app gives you turn-by-turn voice guidance along your line, plus off-route alerts if you drift. If you're heading somewhere signal is unreliable, the offline download is the step not to skip.

Check your GPX route before you trust it

A drawn route is only as good as the map data under it. Routing engines follow what's mapped, and the map is sometimes wrong, out of date or a little too optimistic. Before you rely on any file, ours or anyone else's, give it five minutes.

Load it into Upload & analyse and look at the map and numbers with fresh eyes. No login is needed to view it, and it runs in your browser. Then check for these:

Gaps and straight lines. A perfectly straight segment cutting across contour lines usually means the router couldn't find a connection and joined two points directly. On the ground, that "path" might be a cliff, a river or a fence. Zoom in on every suspiciously tidy section.

Private or closed ways. Map data can include farm tracks, forestry roads and paths that exist but aren't open to the public, or that close seasonally. Junctions near farms, quarries and military areas deserve a second look. If you want to understand how these are tagged in OpenStreetMap, the access key documentation is a good read.

Ferry legs. On longer drives, a line that crosses a lake or a fjord in one straight hop is often a ferry. That might be exactly what you want, or it might be a seasonal service that isn't running when you travel. Either way, you want to know before you're at the pier.

Numbers that don't add up. If the distance or climb looks wildly different from a similar route, find out why. Compare with a published trail in the same area, like those in Austria's hiking destinations.

Point spacing. Very sparse points make a line that cuts corners; very dense ones make a heavy file some older devices struggle with. Precision GPX explains the trade-off.

If something looks off, go back to the Composer, add a stop on the path you actually want, and regenerate. It takes a minute and saves an hour of backtracking.

When not to draw your own

Sometimes the best GPX is one someone has already walked. A route recorded on the ground has already been checked against reality. Before you plan from scratch, search the trail catalog for something close and see whether it fits. Our post on how to download GPX files covers exporting from trail pages, including the reversed version if you want to go the other way.

Cyclists can do the same: the Danube Island to Klosterneuburg Ride is 28.5 km with 215 m of climbing, rated Moderate, and might save you planning a riverside spin around Vienna yourself. If you're new to unpaved riding, gravel riding for beginners pairs well with this post.

The short version

Choose the profile first. Place as few stops as you can, on the path. Read the profile and the weather, compare two versions, then export. Check the file for gaps, closed ways and ferries before you go, and download it for offline use. And always tell someone your plan: the safety guidelines have the rest.

Where to next?

• Start planning: open the Route Composer and draw your first line.
• Planning a hike specifically? Read our hiking route planner guide.
• Need it in a hurry? The quick guide to creating a GPX route has the six-step version.
• Already have a file from Google Earth? Turn it into GPX with KML to GPX.
• Recorded something good? Publish your trail so the next person can follow it.