Add Strava Heatmap to Gaia GPS

strava_in_gaia.md

Adding Strava Global Heatmap to Gaia

This adds the Strava Global Heatmap layer to Gaia GPS, so you can see common tracks on where other people have been outside. Like this:

Steps

1. Log into https://www.gaiagps.com/map
2. On the left sidebar, go to Layers
3. Scroll all the way down to the bottom and click Add Map Layers:

4. Scroll all the way down to the bottom and click Add Custom Source:

5. Paste in https://heatmap-external-b.strava.com/tiles/all/hot/{z}/{x}/{y}.png as the URL. Increase zoom range to full extent. Preview on map to check that it worked. Click Save.

Options

The above URL shows the heatmap for all activity types. However, you can limit the activity type to specific activities. To do this, swap out the all in the URL for one of the accepted types. eg for winter (AKA skiing): https://heatmap-external-b.strava.com/tiles/winter/hot/{z}/{x}/{y}.png

For example, I have one layer in Gaia for winter, and another for all, depending on the activity I'm doing.

The accepted types are

• all
• ride (biking)
• run
• water
• winter

Caveats

This only gives you a very blurry layer. This is because Strava only allows for very zoomed-out viewing of the global heatmap for users that are not logged in. If you log in, then theoretically you will be able to get higher-resolution layers, but I never tried this. See this project to try that.