Convert GPX to Shapefile (SHP)

GPX to Shapefile: why convert

GPS receivers from Garmin and Trimble, phone apps such as Strava, Komoot or OsmAnd and most field survey tools export their data as GPX. In a GIS project you often want those waypoints and tracks as shapefiles: to measure a recorded route in a projected system, to clip it with other layers, to hand it to a colleague who uses ArcGIS, or to keep it with the rest of a survey. QGIS can read a GPX directly, but every save means picking the right one of five layers and clearing a long list of empty fields. This page does it in one step: it reads the GPX with GDAL, the library QGIS uses, writes one shapefile per kind of data with only the fields that hold a value, and can reproject the result to a UTM zone or a national grid. Your track, which shows where you live and when you were out, never leaves your computer.

How to convert GPX to Shapefile

1. Drop your .gpx file in the box, or click to choose it.
2. Check the track on the map. If you need meters, choose a coordinate system such as a UTM zone, and tick the box if you want every track point.
3. Click Convert and download a .zip with the shapefiles.

What changes when you convert

Waypoints, routes and tracks are separate shapefiles

A shapefile holds one geometry type, but a GPX can mix single points (waypoints), planned lines (routes) and recorded lines (tracks). Each kind that is present becomes its own shapefile, named waypoints.shp, routes.shp and tracks.shp, together in one .zip; a file with only a track gives one shapefile named after the GPX. A track that was paused has several segments; it stays one feature with several parts (a multipart polyline), so the gap is not bridged by a straight line.

Times are on the track points, not on the line

A line in a shapefile has one row of attributes, so the time of each recorded point cannot be part of it. Tick "Also include every track point" to get an extra shapefile, track_points.shp, with one point per position and its time, elevation, track_id, seg_id and point_id as fields. A two-hour ride recorded every second gives over 7,000 points. Waypoint times are kept in any case.

Time is stored as text

The .dbf format behind a shapefile has a date type without hours and minutes, so a time such as 2024-05-01 08:15:30 would lose its time of day. The time field is therefore written as text in the form 2024/05/01 08:15:30+00 (UTC). In QGIS you can turn it into a real date and time with the expression to_datetime("time", 'yyyy/MM/dd HH:mm:ss') when you need it for the temporal controller.

Heart rate, cadence and power become fields

Garmin watches and bike computers store heart rate, cadence, power and temperature as extensions to each track point, for example gpxtpx:hr. They are written as fields such as hr, cad, power and atemp of track_points.shp, so you can color a ride by heart rate in QGIS. The track line itself holds only name, description and the other track fields.

Elevation, field names and coordinate system

The ele value of each point becomes the Z value, so you get 3D shapefiles (PointZ, PolylineZ); a waypoint also keeps ele as a field. GPX field names are already short, but link fields such as link1_href are kept as they are. GPX is always WGS84, so the shapefile gets a .prj for EPSG:4326 unless you choose a projected system, which you need to measure lengths in meters.