An Apple Shortcut that merges several GPX tracks into one route on iPhone, offline and without an app, with a waypoint at the start of each stage.
Why GPX Combiner?
I love wide open spaces: the countryside, the mountains, and above all trekking over several days.
During a long trip to RĂŠunion Island, with no computer for the whole stay, I was planning a multi-day trek. To organize it, I used the Komoot (opens in a new tab) app. I had grouped the stages in a collection, but Komoot only exports the GPX of one route at a time, not of a whole collection. I needed a simple solution, right from my phone.
I didn't want to install yet another app for a one-time need, and it had to work without network. And to be honest, I also wanted the fun of building something, even without a computer. So I opened Apple Shortcuts.
What it does
GPX Combiner takes several GPX files and turns them into one complete track. The flow is short:
- Pick your GPX files. All the stages you want to join.
- Set the order. Apple Shortcuts doesn't guarantee the order of the files you select, so the Shortcut asks you to put the stages in the right sequence.
- Name your route. The name goes inside the GPX file and is also used for the file name: "Piton des Neiges Loop" becomes
piton-des-neiges-loop.gpx. - That's it. Send the new track to your favorite hiking app, or save it as a GPX file.
The result is a single continuous track, but the stages aren't lost along the way: the start of each stage gets a named waypoint, so you can still see where every day begins on the map.
How it works
- Built on the phone, for the phone. The whole Shortcut was written and tested on my iPhone, over several rounds, until it worked. Then polished on my Mac once I got back :)
- Works offline. Everything happens on the device. No server, no account, no network needed.
- No new app. Shortcuts is already on every iPhone, so there's nothing to install except the Shortcut itself.
- A reusable building block. File names are made with Slugify (opens in a new tab), a small Shortcut I extracted along the way. Other Shortcuts can call it, just like you would install an npm package.
Built with: Apple Shortcuts, and nothing else.