Clean and Edit GPX Files from GPS Device in QGIS – Complete Guide

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During a long trip, I have recorded tracks of my journey with the GPS of my smartphone. I have ended up with about 30 GPX datafiles.

Now that I am back, I am trying to draw a map of this trip.
I imported each file in QGIS as vector layer, and visualized the tracks with OpenLayers Plugin.

Now I need to edit some of these files:

  • basically trimming the end and beginning of many files
  • merging some tracks
  • adding a title or a description for each track

What is the way to do it with QGIS ?

I would like to keep as much data as possible from the source data (timestamp, elevation)

Best Answer

I'm also searching for a really good way to do this... but in the meantime I do have a system which works OK. Slow but effective:

Use the Openstreetmap editor JOSM. This is good at displaying GPX info. Use the plugin 'InfoMode'. This makes it easy to see the time data on the GPX track. Note exact times for the nodes which you want to edit/delete etc. Edit the GPX file by hand in a text editor which is good at displaying XML files (or a specific XML editor of course).

Note that JOSM seems to take account of local time - so for me it shows times in UK summer time - whereas the GPX file has times in GMT/UTC.

Being able to use 'regular expressions' with the text editor helps if it turns out that your GPS has inserted additional useless information into the GPX (which you want to delete).

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