Draw the line you already know.

Search for a place, then click or tap the map in the order you want to travel. Each point becomes part of one continuous track. Drag a point when the line misses a bend; use Undo for the last point; turn on terrain shading when terrain matters. The distance and elevation profile update while you work.

The line follows the points you place instead of calculating roads or turns, which is what lets you trace informal trails, waterways, field boundaries, or a route from a paper map. Check access, current conditions, and whether the route is safe before following it.

On a phone, tap the map to plot and drag a point to nudge it. Escape pauses drawing.

Yes, on request. Press Follow the roads and the points on your line go once to the public FOSSGIS routing servers, which draw a track along roads and streets on OpenStreetMap data. The first pass drives; once a line has come back, the Drive, Bike, and Walk buttons appear, and switching one sends the points again for that mode. Nothing is sent before that first click.

The rebuilt line replaces the straight one, and Undo brings the straight line back. Because the routing service decides for itself between your points, it can take a different street than another app would. The map tells you how long the line along roads is, how long your points were point to point, and how far the rebuilt line strayed from that straight line. A few points on the bends are enough: a dense line is thinned to its bends before it is sent, because routing through points a few metres apart makes the service double back on itself.

The download is a GPX 1.1 XML file with one track and one track segment. Every point includes latitude and longitude; elevation is included when terrain sampling is available. It does not contain turn-by-turn instructions, timestamps, waypoints, or GPX route elements. GPX-compatible mapping tools and GPS devices can open the file as a track.

The official schema distinguishes a route—a list of turn points—from a track, which describes a path. The downloaded line is stored as a track. For element-level details, read the GPX guide.

GPX is an exchange format, so compatibility depends on how the receiving app treats tracks. Garmin Connect accepts GPX files for manual upload, and Garmin also documents GPX as a supported format when importing a third-party course. A phone app that imports GPX tracks can read the same file, but names, elevation, and course behavior may be interpreted differently by each product.

If your goal is a Garmin course rather than an activity upload, follow our Garmin GPX instructions and check the instructions for your exact device. Keep a copy of the original file before converting it elsewhere.

No. Plotting, editing, reading a GPX file, and writing a new one all happen in your browser. The draft is stored locally on that device. Map tiles, terrain tiles, and place-search results still require network requests, but the GPX file and its coordinates are not sent to a Map to GPS server.

Following the roads is the one exception, and it is a button rather than a background job: your points go to the public FOSSGIS routing servers (Valhalla, then OSRM) and nowhere else. Elevation for the profile is sampled from public terrain tiles, and the resulting track is still written and stored only on this device.

A share link is different: it encodes the line in the URL so another person with the link can open it. Treat that link as route data and only send it to people you trust. See the privacy policy for details about local route data, analytics, and third-party map services.

The basemap is rendered through OpenFreeMap using OpenStreetMap data. OpenStreetMap describes its database as open data under the ODbL and requires attribution; the interactive map carries that attribution. Terrain shading and elevation estimates come from Terrarium-format public terrain tiles and should be treated as estimates, not survey measurements.