Sharing a walk or ride route safely

A route from your watch or phone is the easiest way to show friends a walk, plan a group ride or report a path problem. It also records exactly where you started (often your front door), when you were out, and how fast you go. These tools tidy and share a route, and put your photos on it, without uploading any of it.

1. Look at what you recorded

Export the activity as GPX (Strava, Garmin Connect, Komoot, AllTrails and OS Maps all can) and open it in the GPS Track Viewer. The drawing shows the shape, with the start in green and the end in red, and the table gives each track’s distance, climb and time. A long straight line usually means the GPS lost signal or you forgot to stop recording in the car.

2. Hide your home and your times

Under Save a copy, set Hide where tracks start and end, within this many metres to 500 or more: every point within that distance of the start or end is dropped, so the route begins a few streets away. Tick Remove times too: times show when you’re usually out, and how long the house was empty. Choose the Format the other person’s app takes (GPX almost everywhere, KML for Google Earth, GeoJSON for web maps, CSV for a spreadsheet) and Save.

3. Put your photos on the route

A camera without GPS still records when each photo was taken. Choose the original track (with its times) and the photos in the Photo Geotagger: each photo is placed where the track was at that moment. Check the Camera’s time zone (filled in from the photos where they record it), and if photos land in the wrong place, the camera’s clock was off: photograph a phone’s clock with the camera next time to measure it, and put the difference in Camera clock fast by. Save the photos with locations for your own albums, or Save as GPX for the photo spots as waypoints.

4. Before posting photos publicly

Photos with locations show exactly where they were taken, including at home. Keep the located copies for your own albums, and post copies without the location: Before you share a photo or document shows how.

5. Give a meeting point people can use

The start of a group walk is better given as a point than a postcode. Paste the position from a map into the Coordinate Converter: it gives it as latitude and longitude, an OS grid reference for paper maps, a Plus Code that works in Google Maps, and links to open it in OpenStreetMap or Google Maps. To check how far the meeting point is from the car park or station, put both in Distance & Bearing.