How to open a GPX file in Google Maps

Why convert?

Google's mapping products read OGC KML 2.3 and its zipped variant KMZ — they do not read GPX. Both formats describe geographic features in XML, but they were designed for different ecosystems: KML grew out of Google Earth (Keyhole, the company Google acquired in 2004), while GPX grew out of the GPS device community at TopoGrafix in 2002. Per Google's import documentation, the supported formats for My Maps are KML, KMZ, CSV, XLSX, and Google Sheets. Conversion is the bridge.

The conversion is mechanical — the same coordinates, written in a different XML dialect. viewmygpx's converter handles it client-side; the .gpx file is read by JavaScript, transformed to KML, and zipped to KMZ in your browser. No file leaves the device.

A bit of history

KML originated at Keyhole, Inc., a CIA-backed mapping startup acquired by Google in 2004 that became Google Earth. KML was the format Earth used to describe placemarks, lines, polygons, and overlays. After Google acquired Keyhole, KML was donated to the Open Geospatial Consortium and ratified as an international standard in 2008 (OGC 12-007r2, revised to KML 2.3 in 2015). GPX, by contrast, was published in October 2002 by TopoGrafix specifically to let GPS devices and mapping apps exchange routes without each vendor inventing its own format. Both formats remain actively used; the difference is mostly which tooling ecosystem built on top of which.

Steps

1. Open viewmygpx and drop your GPX file onto the viewer. Visit viewmygpx.com and drag the .gpx file into the drop zone, or click to choose a file. The route renders in your browser; nothing uploads to a server. Confirm the route looks right — correct start and end, plausible distance, no missing segments.
2. Click Download as KMZ. Google Maps imports KML and KMZ but not GPX, so conversion is required. The Download as KMZ button on the viewer produces a single zipped KML file, named after your input file with a .kmz extension.
3. Open Google My Maps and sign in. In a new tab, go to mymaps.google.com and sign in with your Google account if prompted. My Maps is a separate product from the regular Google Maps app, with its own URL and editor.
4. Create a new map and import the KMZ. Click the red Create a new map button (top-left). On the new map, click Import in the left sidebar under the default layer name. Drop the KMZ file you downloaded, or browse for it. The route polyline renders on Google's base map within a few seconds.
5. Save and name the map. Click the map title (it defaults to Untitled map) to rename. The map saves automatically to your Google Drive. To see the imported route in the standard Google Maps app, open Google Maps, click Saved (the bookmark icon at the bottom on mobile, or in the side menu on desktop), then the Maps tab — your imported map appears there.

Mobile vs desktop

Google My Maps' import flow is desktop-only — the mobile interface at mymaps.google.com is read-only. If you are starting on a phone, the practical workflow is: do the GPX → KMZ conversion in mobile Safari or Chrome (it runs fine on phones), email the KMZ to yourself or save it to Drive, then open Google My Maps on a desktop browser to import. Once imported, the saved map appears under Saved → Maps in the regular Google Maps mobile app and can be browsed there without further desktop work.

What My Maps imports (and what it leaves behind)

The KMZ file contains everything from the GPX — coordinates, elevation, timestamps, waypoints, names, and any extensions — but Google My Maps only renders a subset of it.

• Imported and visible: the route polyline on the 2D base map, named waypoints as pins, the route's overall shape and length.
• In the file but not displayed: elevation values (no profile chart in My Maps; use Google Earth for 3D terrain), timestamps, sensor data (heart rate, cadence, temperature extensions from Garmin or Wahoo).
• Stripped during conversion: the GPX's creator metadata, route descriptions beyond the basic name, and GPX-specific extension namespaces. KML doesn't have direct equivalents for these, so the converter omits them rather than fabricate.

For files where elevation matters — terrain visualization, climb analysis — Google Earth Web is the better destination. The same KMZ works there, with elevation rendered against the digital elevation model.

What you can do with the imported route

• Edit the polyline. Click any vertex on the line, drag to adjust. Useful for cleaning up GPS jitter or adjusting a section that crosses private land.
• Change line style. Color, width, and labels are editable per layer. The default after import is a generic blue line — pick something that contrasts with the base map.
• Add markers and notes. Click anywhere on the map to drop a pin. Add photos, descriptions, or links — useful for tagging viewpoints or rest stops along the route.
• Share or embed. The Share button produces a link with view-only or editor permissions. The Embed on my site option generates an iframe snippet for a website.
• View in the regular Google Maps app. Once saved, the map appears under Saved → Maps in the consumer Google Maps app on phone and web. You can't navigate along the route, but you can see it on top of the standard map and zoom around it.

Limitations

Google My Maps has hard limits, documented in Google's support article. The relevant ones for GPX imports:

• 5 MB per imported file. A typical KMZ (compressed) for a 50–100 km route is well under this; very dense recordings with thousands of trackpoints can exceed it.
• 2,000 features per layer. A single track polyline is one feature regardless of vertex count, so dense tracks usually don't hit this. Many waypoints can.
• 10 layers per map, 10,000 features per map total. Relevant for combining multiple imports into a single map.
• No turn-by-turn navigation. The imported route is a visual reference, not a navigable course. Google Maps cannot follow it the way a fitness or navigation app would.
• Limited offline use. Saved maps appear in the consumer Google Maps app, but offline-area downloads in that app don't include custom map content from My Maps reliably.

Troubleshooting

The errors most people run into when bringing a GPX file into Google My Maps, and how to resolve each:

"We couldn't import this file"

Almost always a file-size or feature-count problem. My Maps rejects files larger than 5 MB or with more than 2,000 features in a single layer. A long recording at high cadence can hit the file-size limit even after KMZ compression. Open the GPX in the viewmygpx editor, use Smooth elevation to remove jitter, then re-export. If the file is genuinely large, decimate the trackpoints — a Douglas-Peucker simplification down to ~500 points typically preserves the route shape and falls well under the limits.

Polyline appears as a thin gray line

Default styling. After import, click the layer name in the left sidebar, then the paint-bucket icon to set line color and width. Trail green or a saturated red over Google's muted base map reads better than the default light gray.

Route does not appear in the regular Google Maps app

Confirm the map was saved (the My Maps title is no longer Untitled map). Then open Google Maps → Saved (bookmark icon) → Maps tab. There is no real-time sync indicator; sometimes the regular app needs to be force-quit and reopened before a newly-created My Map appears in the list.

The route is in the wrong location

Almost certainly a bad GPX, not a Google issue. Open the file in the viewmygpx viewer first. If the route looks correct there, it will be correct in My Maps. If the route is in the wrong place in the viewer too, the GPX itself has bad coordinates — most often because the file was hand-edited or generated by a converter that mis-handled the WGS-84 datum.

Names of waypoints look garbled

Character-encoding issue. GPX files should be UTF-8 (the default, and what TopoGrafix specifies); some legacy desktop tools save in Windows-1252 and the conversion mis-decodes accented characters. Open the .gpx in a text editor, save explicitly as UTF-8, then re-run the conversion.

Advanced tips

Sharing permissions

My Maps shares are governed by the same Google Drive permission model as a Google Doc. Anyone with the link works for public visibility; Restricted requires the recipient to sign in with a Google account and be on the share list. Embedded iframes inherit the parent map's sharing — a private map will not render to anonymous visitors of your website.

Embedding on a website

The Embed on my site option produces an iframe with a standard width and height. Wrap the iframe in a responsive container with aspect-ratio: 16/9 if you want it to scale on mobile. Embedded maps support pan, zoom, and pin-click, but cannot be edited from the embedded view — that always opens My Maps in a new tab.

Layering multiple GPX files into one map

Up to 10 layers per map. After importing the first KMZ, click Add layer in the left sidebar, then Import to bring in the next file. A multi-day route is easier to read with each day as its own colored layer; a comparison of two route options reads better with each option as a separate layer.

Routing along the imported polyline

Not supported — Google's routing engine cannot follow a custom polyline. The closest approximations: drop pins at key points along your route in My Maps, then use Add directions in My Maps to draw a routed path between them. The resulting directed line uses Google's road-network routing, not your original GPX, but for road-following routes it is often very close.

Bringing the route to the standard Google Maps mobile app

After saving in My Maps, open the regular Google Maps app on the phone, sign in with the same Google account, and navigate to Saved → Maps. Custom maps appear in the list and can be opened on the standard map view. Note: the standard app does not let you tap a polyline vertex to start navigation — for that, send the route to a turn-by-turn app like Komoot, Gaia GPS, or a dedicated cycling app instead.

Alternatives

• Google Earth Web for 3D terrain. Imports the same KMZ; renders elevation in 3D over the digital elevation model. Best for visualizing climbs, valleys, and terrain context. No editing, no sharing — viewing only.
• The viewmygpx viewer for visualization-only use. If you only want to look at the route — distance, profile, stats, base-layer toggle between street/topo/satellite — the viewer on viewmygpx.com does that without the conversion or import step.
• A dedicated route-following app for navigation. Komoot, Ride with GPS, or Gaia GPS support GPX import directly and offer turn-by-turn following. The viewmygpx Open GPX in... hub has guides for each.

One sanity check before you import

If your GPX file came from a converter (KML2GPX, online conversion sites), it may have stripped elevation or timestamps during conversion. The viewmygpx viewer shows a No elevation or timing data note when this is the case. For Google My Maps' purposes that doesn't matter — My Maps doesn't display elevation anyway — but for Google Earth or any fitness platform, you may want to recover elevation first using a tool like GPSVisualizer's elevation tool, which fills SRTM elevation values into a GPX before you convert.