GPX ViewLighten a GPX track
Is your device refusing a file for being too heavy? Drop it and pick the number of points it accepts: the track comes back lighter, and the same shape. No account to create, nothing to install.
Your file never leaves your device
Reading, lightening and saving all happen in the browser. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is kept, no server sees your track. Close the tab and nothing is left of it.
How it works
Drop
Drag your file in, or paste the link to a published track. The browser opens it itself: there is no queue and no upload.
Pick the ceiling
Four steps, the ones devices actually impose. The page shows straight away what each one gives: point count, distance, elevation gain.
Save
The file produced keeps your own name, followed by "-lightened". It is written by the browser, straight into your downloads.
Why lighten a track
A device that refuses the file
That is the commonest reason, and the symptom misleads: the GPS does not say "too many points", it truncates the track halfway, or does not import it at all. A lightened file goes in with nothing else changed.
A file too heavy to share
An outing recorded every second weighs several megabytes for a route of a few dozen kilometres. Lightened, it sends, opens and draws anywhere, including on an old phone.
A track chopped up by the GPS
Under trees or between buildings, a recording zigzags around the real path. Lightening shortens those spurious to-and-fros and brings the line closer to what was actually walked.
Kept: the shape of the route, the elevations and hours of passage of the points that remain, the waypoints and the file's own breaks. Lost: a little distance — cutting corners always shortens things slightly, and the page tells you by how much before you download.
What this page cannot do
A browser does not walk down into a valley with no signal. GPX View keeps your tracks and maps on your phone, guides you along the way and records your outings — still with no account.
Frequently asked questions
- Is my file sent anywhere?
- No. It is read, lightened and written again by your browser, and never transmitted. You can cut your connection after the page has loaded: the lightening still works.
- How many points does my device accept?
- It depends on the model, and the manual rarely says: from five hundred points per track on older devices to tens of thousands on recent ones. When in doubt, try a thousand: enough for the shape of the route to stay true, and low enough for almost anything to take it.
- Do I lose distance?
- A little, yes, and it cannot be helped: lightening means cutting corners. The page tells you how many metres before you download, along with the largest gap between the new path and the old one. On a twenty-kilometre route brought down to a thousand points, the loss is measured in tens of metres.
- Does the elevation gain change too?
- Yes, a little, and usually downwards: the points removed take with them the micro-climbs the device had recorded. The figure shown after lightening is that of the file you are downloading, computed exactly like the one before — you are comparing two measurements made the same way.
- Do the start and the finish move?
- Never. Both ends of every segment are always kept: a track must not start or finish anywhere other than where it really does.
- What about my waypoints?
- They are all kept, where they are. They are not part of the path: lightening them would make no sense, and a refuge removed from a file is a refuge nobody finds.
- Do I need an account?
- No, neither here nor in the app. There is no account to create, so nothing to remember and nothing to delete.