Track detail
Split, colour and read a GPS track on Android
Most GPS loggers stop being interesting the moment the recording is saved: you get a line on a map and a distance. This guide is about the other half — what you can do with one saved track afterwards. Restyle it, read its elevation and speed profile, find every place you stood still, and cut a long recording into the trips that were actually inside it. Everything below happens on one screen in GPS Logger, and works the same on a recorded track and on an imported GPX file.
Change a route’s colour and line width
The default magenta line is chosen to survive any map background, not to be pretty. If it fights with your map, tap the palette button on the track map and pick something else: ten route colours, and three line widths — slim, standard or bold — so a thin GPS trace can be made readable at arm’s length.
Two details make this more useful than a theme setting:
- It is per map view. The satellite view and the plain map view are separate entries, so the colour that reads well over imagery is not forced onto the one that reads well over a street map.
- The halo follows the colour. A near-white or near-black route flips its outline to the opposite side, so a white route over satellite imagery stays visible instead of disappearing into the ground.
Route appearance is free on every tier — it is not a Pro upsell.
Colour the route by speed instead
The same palette panel switches the line from one flat colour to a speed colouring, so the route itself shows where you were quick and where you crawled. There are two palettes: Classic, the familiar warm-to-cool ramp, and Colour-vision safe, which stays readable with red–green colour blindness. Whichever you choose is used both on the map and in the speed graph, so the two agree.
You are choosing per view here too, so the Track view can stay a plain line while the Speed view is coloured by speed — the app remembers both rather than making you re-pick.
Read the elevation and speed profile
The Profile view draws Elev, Speed, or Both on one graph, and can take the whole panel when you want to actually study it. Drag along the graph and the matching point is marked on the map, so a strange spike in the data has a place attached to it.
Under the chart options there are four things worth knowing:
- Axis — distance or time. Time shows stops as flat stretches; distance skips them, so one piece of route compares fairly with another.
- Speed smoothing — how hard the curve is averaged. More smoothing shows the shape of a leg; less keeps every sprint, and every GPS wobble.
- Speed source — the speed each fix arrived with, or speed worked out from the distance and time between fixes. Try the calculated one on an imported track that carries no speed of its own.
- Elevation source — the altitude that came with the track, or the height of the ground beneath it. See recorded altitude or terrain data? for which to trust; either way your recording is never rewritten.
Find where you actually stopped
A long recording is mostly waiting. The Stops view finds the places you stayed put — you set the radius and the dwell time that count as a stop — and then walks you through them one at a time, one card per stop, with the map framed on the stay rather than jumping to a fixed zoom, so two stops near each other still resolve apart.
A toggle decides whether paging through stops moves the map at all, which matters when you are comparing a stop against the route around it rather than inspecting it on its own.
Split a GPX track into separate trips
Tracks arrive at the wrong size all the time: one recording that ran all day and holds a commute, a lunch walk and a drive home, or an imported file that someone else merged. Splitting them by hand in a desktop editor is tedious. In GPS Logger it is a dedicated screen with one map:
- Open the track and choose Split or crop.
- Tap Suggest. The app proposes cuts where it found stops, changes of activity, and gaps in the recording — the boundaries you would have looked for anyway.
- Add your own cut by tapping the route, or remove a proposed one.
- Open any cut to adjust it at seam scale: snap it to the moment movement starts or ends, scrub along the speed graph, or step fix by fix with ‹ › while the app tells you how much route each nudge moves between the two parts.
- Name the parts you want, mark the ones you don’t as dropped, and commit.
The result is previewed before you accept it, and there is an undo that puts the whole original recording back — dropped parts included.
Crop a track by dropping the parts you don’t want
Cropping is the same tool used differently. Cut around the section you care about, drop everything else, and a nine-hour recording becomes the ninety-minute walk that was inside it. Dropped parts are not saved to any track, so this is how you get rid of the drive to the trailhead without hand-editing a GPX file.
If you would rather keep the whole day intact and simply read it as separate visits and journeys, the app can do that instead, without cutting anything — see the Google Timeline alternative guide.
Splitting and cropping are free on every tier — any track, as often as you like. What Free limits is how many tracks the app lists at once (the latest 10), and splitting makes more tracks — so that is the limit you may meet, not the scissors.
It works the same on imported files
None of this is limited to tracks you recorded on the phone. Import a GPX file and it gets the same detail screen: profile, stops, appearance, splitting. That is often the fastest way to clean up an archive that came out of another app — see how to import GPX files on Android.