Guides · Product · 19 July 2026
What actually happens when you connect Strava to Atlas
The two minutes between clicking "Connect Strava" and seeing your bagging history, explained honestly - what we read, what we store, and what we never touch.
"Connect your Strava" is the kind of button people rightly hesitate over. Here's exactly what happens when you press ours, in the order it happens, including the parts that are boring. Transparency is cheaper than trust recovered later.
Step by step
1. You authorise on Strava, not on Atlas. The button sends you to Strava's own OAuth page, where Strava tells you what access you're granting. You never type your Strava password into Atlas, and you can revoke the connection at any time from Strava's settings (or ours) with one click.
2. We ask for read access to your activities. That's the scope. We can read your recorded activities and their GPS tracks. We cannot post, edit, delete, follow anyone, or see anything a permission doesn't cover.
3. The import queue starts pulling your history. Activities come in newest first. A free account imports your last 12 months; Pro backfills your full history, which for the deep archives (a decade of a Garmin-wearing fell runner) can mean thousands of activities. Only foot-based activities count: walks, runs, hikes. Your rides are ignored, not judged.
4. Each track is matched against the geographic database. This is the actual product. Every GPS track is compared against surveyed locations: peaks count when your track passes within 75 m of the summit, trig points and landmarks within about 50 m, trail sections when your track covers enough of the section corridor, region coverage from where your tracks actually went. No AI, no guessing: geometry.
5. Your record appears. Collections fill in with dates, the map shades where you've been, achievements unlock for things you did years ago. The whole run typically takes a couple of minutes for a year of history.
What we store, and what we don't
We store the activity's track, date, distance and name, plus everything derived from matching (which summits, which sections, which landmarks). We don't store your Strava password (we never see it), we don't touch data outside the granted scope, and we don't sell anything to anyone. Deleting your Atlas account deletes the imported data with it, and there's a full account reset if you want a clean slate without leaving.
The honest limitations
- Wrong or missing matches happen. GPS drifts in gullies and under crags. There's an import review screen for exactly this, and every activity's matches can be corrected.
- Privacy zones are respected. If your Strava privacy settings hide the start of a track, we match on what we receive.
- Garmin has no direct connection yet. Garmin's partner programme has a long queue and we're in it. Meanwhile Garmin's GPX export imports cleanly.
- Strava's API sets the pace. Very large backfills are rate-limited by Strava, so a 10-year archive arrives over hours, not minutes. It keeps going by itself; no need to babysit it.
The point of the design
Atlas doesn't record, plan or navigate, which means connecting it changes nothing about how you walk. You keep recording with whatever you already use. Atlas just reads the story your tracks have been quietly writing for years and, two minutes after you connect, shows you how it ends: usually with a number, and a list of what's left.
Related
Atlas matches your Strava or GPX archive against every UK peak, trail and trig point. Find out free.