Route names lost when importing GPX

Some time last fall, my Inreach map page started having this problem -- when importing a GPX as a route, the individual route segments all end up with the same name, which is the file name of the original GPX file.  I looked at my older routes and saw that I had successfully imported a GPX early last September and all the segments are named correctly, but another import that I did in January is no good. And that issue still exists.

Is this a known, recent issue with the Inreach map page? Or is there a specific way I should be saving the import file?  I've tried GPX, KML and KMZ, but they all have the same issue.

  • Don’t know that I’ve ever imported a file with more than one track segment. I am not clear on your result. Just ONE route named after the file? Or multiple routes all with the same name?

    If multiple routes, just rename them. Select one at a time in the left sidebar of the map page, click the pencil icon, fix the name, click the check mark icon.

    If only one route, you might try manually splitting the .gpx into multiple files, with one segment per file. Name the files as you want the routes named. Import individually.

  • Yes, multiple segments all with the same name. Renaming manually won't be happening, since there are hundreds. This wasn't a problem until some time after September of last year.

  • So how were the individual segments named previously? Offhand, I don't remember what information is available on a trackseg in the .gpx file. Or how it might get set when recording a track on a device. Or were these downloaded from one of the crowd-sourced trail web sites?

    Or were they separate tracks in the same .gpx?

  • These are routes that I created on the caltopo.com site and exported to gpx.  They're all named correctly in the gpx file, but it seems that the Inreach site has lost its ability to read and/or utilize the <name> tag in the file.  It does bring in the <name> tag attribute for all the waypoints in the same file, however.

  • Might be worth contacting support. I doubt if they have an immediate fix or workaround, but they need to hear that it's desirable functionality. There's been a lot going on with the website lately. They're integrating all sorts of non-iR devices (or integrating iR devices with the rest of the ecosystem, depending on your viewpoint). I think sometimes they lose track of the importance of some use cases.

    And this particular thing might not be hard to fix. It's not like they were joining all the segments into one route, or something like that.

  • I duplicated it myself, using an edited version of a file exported from explore.garmin.com. Definitely behaves exactly as you describe it. I consider it broken, although the folks behind the web site may not.

  • I emailed support a few days ago and just got a reply that they're sending this issue to an engineering team that can figure it out. I also discovered there's another issue with the import process -- some of my route segments are being combined automatically.  It feels like it's by design, like they're doing me a favor by simplifying my routes, but all it's doing is 1) making it impossible to rename and re-color my routes the way I want, and 2) it's creating the issue of going over the limit of 200 points per segment, which is one of the reasons I create so many segments to begin with.

  • Still exchanging emails with tech support and haven't resolved anything yet. The tech support rep explained to me that combining routes happens when the end point of one segment and beginning of another are almost the same, and basically acted like "why wouldn't you want that?". smh...

  • You can just tell by looking at some of the "features" that the folks behind the web site don't always "get it" when it comes to outdoor users. You should always open the support ticket, but you can't depend on getting them to accept your point. When it's a matter of opinion like this, you win some and you lose some.

  • I bugged them for a while about their decision to remove the zoom buttons in Earthmate and they told me those buttons "weren't needed" because you could simply pinch to zoom. I explained to them that when I'm wearing gloves I can usually manage to get single screen taps to work, but multi-touch won't work at all unless I stop and take a glove off. I gave up at the time, but was very happy to see an update to Earthmate a few months later that returned the zoom buttons as a selectable option. So this request might go nowhere for now, but there's always hope. :-)