You spend a happy half-hour in PitStopper stringing water, cafes, fuel and a bail-out supermarket along your route. Then what? The stops live in PitStopper, but the ride happens on your bike computer or your phone. Getting the two to meet has always meant bundling everything into the route GPX as waypoints - which works, but it mixes your stops into the track file, and some apps treat a waypoint-heavy GPX oddly.
Often, though, you do not want the route at all. You want just the stops - a tidy layer of points you can switch on over whatever map you are already looking at. That is what the new export does.
Export → Export POIs only
There is a new entry in the Export menu: Export POIs only. It saves your points of interest on their own, with no route track, and asks one question - which format:
- GPX (waypoints) - a plain GPX containing only waypoints.
- Mapsforge .poi - a native points-of-interest database.
You can limit the export to your favourites or your flagged POIs, and every POI keeps its full name. That is the whole dialog. Pick a format, export, done.
Two formats, two jobs
They exist because they are good at different things.
GPX (waypoints) is the universal one. It is an ordinary GPX file with waypoints and nothing else - no track to confuse anything. It opens almost everywhere: Cruiser, Locus Map, Garmin, Komoot, Google Earth, you name it. If you just want your stops somewhere and you are not fussy about how they are organised, this is the safe choice that always works.
Mapsforge .poi is the native one. Mapsforge is the mapping engine underneath a whole family of offline outdoor apps - most notably Cruiser and Locus Map. A .poi file is their home format for points of interest: a small database, grouped into categories, that the app treats as a first-class, searchable layer rather than a loose scattering of pins. It is more compact and far better organised than GPX inside those apps. The trade-off is niche: only Mapsforge-based apps read it. Hand a .poi to Garmin or Strava and they will not know what to do with it - that is what the GPX is for.
The neat part is that PitStopper builds that little database right in your browser. Nothing is uploaded; the file is assembled locally and handed straight to your downloads.
What it looks like in Cruiser
Load a PitStopper .poi into Cruiser and it does not arrive as a loose scattering of pins. Because it is a real categorised database, Cruiser reads it as a proper layer: open its Points of interest panel and every category from your file is listed, named and toggleable.
Cafes, Drinking Water, Gas Stations, Hotels, Pubs, Restaurants, Supermarkets - the same groupings you use in PitStopper, plus an Other bucket for anything that did not have a category (a manually dropped pin, say). Untick a category and those markers vanish; search the box and it looks inside your POIs by name. None of that is possible with a flat pile of GPX waypoints.
And on the map, each stop is drawn with the icon for its kind - a cup for the cafe, a fork for the restaurant, a droplet for the water, a tankard for the pub, a bed for the hotel, a trolley for the supermarket. Here it is over the same Leerbeek route from our navigation-extensions write-up: the numbered pins and the coloured line are the route itself, loaded separately, and the POIs are the purple category markers strung around it.
That is the pairing worth spelling out: the route tells you the way, the POI file tells you where to stop, and in an app like Cruiser they sit on one map together.
Which one should I pick?
- Going to Cruiser or Locus Map? Use Mapsforge .poi. You get named categories, filtering and search, and a tidier map.
- Going anywhere else, or not sure? Use GPX (waypoints). It opens in everything, including Cruiser and Locus, just without the category niceties.
When in doubt, the GPX will never let you down. The .poi is the treat for people already living in the Mapsforge world.
Not heading for a map app?
Sometimes a map layer is not what you are after at all, and PitStopper already had you covered there. Two other exports sit in the same menu:
- Export POIs as CSV - a plain spreadsheet of your stops, with name, category, coordinates, distance along the route and the details PitStopper found. Open it in Excel or Google Sheets to sort, filter and share your stops as a table, or feed it into something else entirely.
- Print POI Report - a tidy, printable list of your waypoints. It makes a fine paper cue sheet for a jersey pocket, or a checklist to hand a support crew, for when you would rather not depend on a screen.
So the full set covers most needs: a map layer for Cruiser and Locus (.poi), waypoints for everything else (GPX), a spreadsheet for tables (CSV), and paper for the pocket (the report).
The details
A few things worth knowing:
- Full names, always. Unlike the route export - where names get trimmed to survive Garmin's short-waypoint limit - a POI file keeps every name in full. Cruiser and Locus have room to show them.
- Favourites and flagged filters. Starred a shortlist, or flagged the maybes? Tick the box and export only those.
- Everything, across every route. If you have several routes loaded, the POI file gathers the stops from all of them - it is a bag of places, not tied to one line.
- Built in your browser. The
.poidatabase is assembled on your machine. Nothing about your stops is sent anywhere.
The bigger idea
PitStopper's job is to find what is along a route - the water before a dry stretch, the cafe open on a Sunday, the last fuel for 40 km. That has always been its half of the deal. This closes the loop: whatever you find, you can now carry into the app you actually navigate with, in the shape that app likes best.
If you plan with a navigation app that speaks GPX turn cues, our piece on the navigation hidden in your GPX covers the other direction - keeping their data intact through PitStopper. Together, the two mean you can round-trip a plan through PitStopper without losing anything, and leave with more than you arrived with.
Find it under Export → Export POIs only. Bring your stops.
