Favourites and GPX

The Saved tab is your own list of places: the campsite that was actually quiet, the put-in with parking, the trailhead you could never find again.

Saving a place

Anywhere you have a pin — a search result, a nearby result, or a long-press on the map — the place card has a Save button. Tap it, and a field appears pre-filled with the place’s name; change it to something you will recognise in a year, and save.

Long-pressing an unnamed spot gives you a pin called Dropped pin, which is exactly the moment to type a real name.

Using, renaming and removing

Open the Saved tab and you get the list, each entry with its name and coordinates.

Tap a place to send it to the map: it pans there, drops the pin, and you are one tap from Route here.
Swipe a row for Rename and Delete. On a Mac, right-click the row — a trackpad has no swipe.
Renaming opens a small dialog with the name in it. Deleting is immediate, so be sure.

Saved places are stored on your device. They are not synced to an account, because there is no account; nothing about them leaves the phone unless you export them yourself.

Exporting as GPX

The ⋯ menu in the Saved tab has Export GPX…. Choose where to put the file and you get a standard GPX 1.1 file with one waypoint per saved place — name, coordinates, and your note and category if they have one.

GPX is the interchange format that everything in this world reads: Garmin and other handhelds, OsmAnd, Gaia, Google Earth, most desktop mapping tools. Exporting is also a perfectly good backup: it is a small text file, and you can email it to yourself.

Importing GPX

The same menu has Import GPX…. Pick a .gpx file and its waypoints are added to your saved places; the app tells you how many were added.

A few things worth knowing:

Waypoints only. A GPX file can hold waypoints, routes and tracks. Only waypoints become saved places — a track is a recording and a route is somebody else’s plan, while a favourite is a place. Importing a file that holds all three takes the waypoints and leaves the rest alone.
Re-importing is safe. A waypoint with the same name within five metres of one you already have is skipped rather than duplicated, so importing last week’s export changes nothing. Two pitches in one campground stay two entries, because they are more than five metres apart.
Old and odd files are fine. The reader is deliberately tolerant: files from a decade-old handheld, files with a byte-order mark, files with the elements in an unexpected order, files with vendor extensions in them. A point with unusable coordinates is dropped and the rest of the file still loads.
If the whole file is not XML at all — a .gpx extension on something else — the import fails and tells you.

Where your places live

Your saved places are a single file, favourites.json, kept in the same folder the app puts downloaded regions in. Every change rewrites it in one atomic step, so an interrupted save cannot leave you with a half-written list or an empty one.

The format is the same on iOS, macOS and Linux — one file that every released version of the app reads, and the one the Android app will read. If the file cannot be read, the app tells you so rather than quietly starting an empty list, because a silent reset is exactly how a saved-places list disappears for good on the next save.

What is not there yet

Syncing between your devices. Planned. Today the way to move places from one device to another is to export GPX and import it on the other.
Editing notes and categories in the app. Planned. A note or a category that arrives with an imported file is kept and exported again, but the app does not yet give you a field to type one in.
Saving a whole route or track. Planned. Saved places are points.