GPX file not uploading to Strava: every reason, and the fix

Strava refuses a GPX file for a short list of reasons, and each one has a one-minute fix. Work down the list.

1. No time data

The most common. A GPX exported from a route planner — Komoot, Strava's own route builder, Ride with GPS, a race organiser — is a route: coordinates without timestamps. Strava makes activities out of recordings, and a recording has times. Track vs route shows the difference in the file.

Fix: record the route and upload the recording. Or, if you must, add timestamps in an editor; tools exist that write an invented pace onto a route. That creates an activity nobody did, with a pace nobody ran. For a print, the editor here draws a route without times perfectly well; it just has no time to show under it.

2. Duplicate activity

Strava already has an activity starting at the same time, almost always because the watch synced it before you uploaded the file. Fix: nothing. The activity is there. If the synced one is wrong and the file is right, delete the synced one first, then upload.

3. Malformed file

The XML is broken: a tag not closed, a file cut off mid-transfer, a file saved by a tool that never finished writing it. Check: open it in a text editor. It should start with `<?xml` and end with `</gpx>`. If it ends abruptly, it was cut off. Fix: export it again from the source. If the source is gone, gpx.studio or the GPX editor can often read what is there and write a clean file; you lose the points after the break.

4. No GPS data

The file has time and sensors but no positions — an indoor session, or a watch that never found satellites. The GPX viewer says so in as many words. Fix: upload it as an indoor activity, or accept there is no map. For a print there is nothing to draw.

5. It is not a GPX

The extension says `.gpx`; the content is something else. Common ones: a `.fit` or `.tcx` renamed, a KML from Google Earth, a zip, an HTML page from a download that failed. Check: a text editor. A FIT shows symbols; a KML says `<kml`; HTML says `<html`. Fix: upload the file as what it is — Strava reads FIT and TCX directly — or convert it: GPX to KML goes the other way, and the tools cover the rest.

6. Too big, too small

A file from a multi-day recording can exceed what Strava will take in one upload; split it with the GPX editor. A file with two points is technically a GPX and practically nothing; Strava may refuse an activity that short.

Garmin says no as well

Garmin Connect refuses for the same reasons, with different words, and one more: it wants an activity file to come from a device it recognises, so a GPX built by hand sometimes lands as a course rather than an activity. Get a GPX onto a Garmin covers that side.

When the file is fine and it still fails

Try a different browser, the desktop site rather than the phone, and one file at a time. If it still fails, the refusal message is the clue; Strava's own help centre lists its upload errors under "Uploading to Strava".