Documenting Your Trek: Recording and Displaying GPX / KML Files

So you want to document your trek, especially the path you followed using GPX or KML files. And you want an easy way to achieve this from your Samsung or other Android phone in the most flexible and shareable manner possible. What about photo annotations? Well, yes - me too. And while there are a plethora trekking applications out there that will record your walk, allow you to attach photos, and plot the walk on a map, they do their upmost to keep you firmly within their little ecosystem. It makes sense - that's where their money is.

The problem is, each of them covers some, but never all of the requirements for blogging and sharing the tracks themselves. For a start, many won't export the GPX file, whilst others present a very simple map for embedding into other applications that is small, static and not in the least bit interactive. Any photos that you wish at attach to the trek must be taken from within the application itself.

It took a little experimenting, but in the end I've found a simple process to record, store and share day treks that provides maximum flexibility and minimum fuss. The data literally takes care of itself, and minimal effort is required to collate and embed the complete trek into your blog or other site. Here it is.

Setting Up
Firstly, grab yourself the application GPSLogger. This application is a stripped down utility that simply records your path to a GPX and KML file, and then provides convenient mechanism to upload those files to a nominated directory on your google drive. No setup is required initially - the default app settings are such that they are set to record with high granularity and are good for most applications.

Record Your Walk

Recording the GPX/KML file for your walk is now effortlessly easy. Just open GPSLogger and hit the 'Trackpoints' counter on the 'Tracks' tab to start recording.

To stop recording, double click the 'tick' icon on the tracks tab. Now go to the 'Tracklist' tab to see your walk recorded. Click on it and use the 'share' option to copy the GPX/KML files up to google drive. Along the way, I would encourage you to use your phone or other geotagging camera to take photos of the experience. Your android phone is good if you are using Google Photos, as your photos are also copied to the cloud without you having to lift a finger.

Mapping, Sharing and Embedding 

With both your GPX/KML files, and your geotagged photos now available in the cloud immediately on completion of your walk, options to share your experiences are immense. Since my primary use-case is to share the trek here in this blog, I'm going to use Google MyMaps to display the track along with a selection of the photos I took.

• Open Google Drive and find your KML file. Download it via your browser.
• Open My Maps in your browser and create a new map.
• On the initial layer, select 'Import' and drag your downloaded KML file in there (if you're using Chrome you can drag it directly from the download status bar)
• Your track should be displayed in the map
• Go go Google Photos and collect together the photos you wish to include in the map. Place these in a temporary album.
• Create a new layer in my maps, and click on import, selecting Google Photos as the import source.
• Locate your temporary album and import.
• Tweak the display settings and everything is good!
• You can now set the map to public and embed it in your document using the 'Embed on my site' option form the meatball menu next to the map name.
• Your embedded map will look something like this: 

Pretty cool. I really love the embedded images. As you might expect, and as you may have noticed from my recorded track, the GPS signal being recorded by your phone will really suffer in the city. Once you hit the bush things will improve markedly, I promise.