GPSLarpHelp

Where are my saved locations kept?

You have built up a list of places you use, and you want to know where it actually lives — to copy it, to edit it, to move it to another Mac, or simply because a list you cannot find is a list you cannot trust.

In one plain text file on your own Mac: ~/Library/Application Support/GPSLarp/locations.json. It is readable, editable and copyable like any other file, which is the good news. The other half of the same fact is that it does not sync anywhere — a second Mac starts with an empty list.

01The file

Every place you save goes into that one file, in JSON — a text format you can open in any editor. Each entry is three things: a name, a latitude and a longitude. There is no database, no hidden store, and no per-place file to hunt for.

That has consequences worth stating as advantages, because they are:

• You can read it. Open it and you can see exactly what is saved and what coordinates are behind each name.
• You can edit it. With GPSLarp closed, so that it does not write over your changes when it next saves.
• You can copy it. Which is the whole of backing up your locations, and the whole of moving them to another Mac.

To get to the folder in Finder, use Go › Go to Folder and paste the path above. The Library folder is hidden by default, which is why typing the path is easier than clicking towards it.

02They do not sync

Not between Macs. Not to your account. Not to any cloud service. The list is local to the machine it was made on, and that is the whole arrangement.

To be precise about it, because the half-truth is more confusing than either whole one: your account does have a place to keep saved locations, and the version of the app you download today does not use it. Signing in on a second Mac does not bring your list across. That Mac starts empty, and stays empty until you either save places on it or copy the file over yourself.

This is a plain limitation rather than a hint about what is coming. Plan around what the app does now: if the list matters to you, the copy of that file is the thing that carries it.

03Backing them up, and moving them

Copy the file. That is genuinely all of it.

• To back up: copy locations.json somewhere else — another folder, an external disk, wherever you keep things. A whole-disk backup of your Mac already includes it.
• To move to another Mac: install GPSLarp there, quit it, and put your copy of the file at the same path on the new machine.
• To start over: quit GPSLarp and delete the file. It starts a fresh empty list the next time it needs one.

Quit the app before replacing or deleting the file. A running app holds the list in memory and writes it back out when it saves, which can undo an edit you made underneath it.

04If you used a much older version

An early version of GPSLarp kept this file at ~/GPSLarp/locations.json — straight in your home folder rather than in Application Support. The current app moves that list forward automatically the first time it runs: it reads the old file and writes your places into the new one.

So there is nothing to do. If you find that old folder still sitting in your home directory with a list in it, its contents have already been carried across, and the file the app now reads is the one under Application Support.

05What else is in that folder

Saved locations are not the only thing GPSLarp keeps there. The same folder holds the record of which free runs you have used and your saved sign-in, so it is the folder that answers "what has this app left on my Mac". Uninstalling GPSLarp lists all of it in one place.

Worth keeping distinct from a different question people often ask in the same breath: what your account holds is not what your Mac holds. They are separate stores with separate contents, which is exactly why an export of your account data can look emptier than the folder on your machine — your saved locations are in the folder, not in the export. Exporting and deleting your data covers the account side.

06Getting places in from outside

There is no import. No file picker, no open command, nothing that takes a list of places and adds them.

One narrow thing exists and it will probably not help you: on its very first run only, before it has written a list of its own, GPSLarp reads a Fun-GPX-Locations folder in Downloads and takes one waypoint from each .gpx file in it. It never looks again. Can I use a GPX file with GPSLarp? has what it does and does not do, including why a route file contributes a single point rather than a path.

So the two ways in are the ordinary one — save a place from inside the app, as covered on setting an exact latitude and longitude — and editing the JSON file directly, which is available to you precisely because the format is plain text.