Why Edit a Recorded Track?
Raw GPS logs are rarely the track you meant to record. The most common reasons to edit:
- You forgot to stop recording. The log has 40 minutes of points jittering around camp after the ride ended — inflating your time and cluttering the map.
- Multi-day trips. One file holds two days of riding and you want a track per day.
- Wrong turns and detours. A backtrack or fuel stop in the middle that doesn't belong in the shared route.
- Privacy. Trimming the first and last half-mile keeps your home or camp location out of shared files.
Trim: Removing the Ends
Trimming keeps a selected range of points and discards everything before and after it. In the GPX Track Editor, two sliders set the start and end of the selection; the map shows the kept range in red and the discarded ends in dashed gray, so you can see exactly what leaves the file before committing.
The automatic trim recommendation
The editor detects the "forgot to stop recording" problem for you. When a file loads, it looks for clusters of points at the start and end that never move more than 15 meters — the signature of a GPS sitting still. If it finds at least 5 such points or more than a minute of stationary time, a recommendation banner reports what it found:
Detected 143 stationary points at the end (22m within 15 m)
— recommended trim keeps points 0–1481.One click applies the recommendation to the sliders. The arrival point is always kept, so the trimmed track still ends where you actually stopped moving — review the map, then hit Trim to Selection.
Cut: Removing a Middle Section
Cutting is the inverse of trimming: the selected range is removed and the track is joined back together across the gap. Use it for backtracks, a lunch loop through town, or any stretch that doesn't belong.
- Set the Start and End sliders around the section to remove
- Confirm on the map that the red selection covers only the unwanted stretch
- Click Cut Selection
Split: One Track Into Two
Position the Start slider where the split should happen, then choose what "two tracks" should mean for your file — there are three valid shapes, and different apps prefer different ones:
| Output | Structure | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Two Files | Two separate .gpx downloads | Sharing days of a trip individually; apps that load one track per file |
| Two Tracks | One file, two <trk> elements | Keeping a trip together in one file; most apps list each track separately |
| Two Segments | One file, one <trk>, two <trkseg> | Representing a recording pause inside one continuous activity |
Tracks vs segments — which is right?
A track (<trk>) is a complete, named recording; a segment (<trkseg>) is a continuous run of points within a track, and a new segment means "recording was interrupted here." If the two halves are genuinely different activities (day 1 / day 2), use tracks. If they're one activity with a pause in the middle (a ferry, a long lunch), segments preserve that meaning — and analysis tools, including our GPX Analyzer, won't count phantom distance across the segment boundary.
Working Safely
Your original file is never touched
The editor works on a copy in your browser and downloads edited files under new names (_edited, _part1, _split). The file on disk stays as recorded.
Undo covers you
Trim and cut operations keep a 20-step undo history, so an over-aggressive trim is one click from restored.
Sensor data survives
Heart rate, cadence, temperature, and speed extensions ride along with every kept point through any edit.
Validate before loading on a device
A pass through the GPX Validator confirms the edited file is clean.