GoPro Cloud links are importing again, chapters and all

Paste a GoPro Cloud share link and it works again. It's been broken since the start of August, and it's fixed as of today.

If you gave up on link imports over the summer, that's the whole announcement. Go and paste one.

Why it broke

GoPro quietly took the Download button off share pages in early August. We were pressing that button on your behalf, so when it disappeared we had nothing to press. Worse, it reached backwards: links you'd made in July, that had already worked, lost the button too. Which is why none of the workarounds going round at the time helped.

We wrote up the diagnosis at the time, and that post is still the best explanation of what happened.

What we did about it

We stopped depending on the button. We now ask your GoPro account for the original file directly.

That matters more than it sounds. The download GoPro still offers on the share page is a compressed copy, and compressed copies have the GPS stripped out of them. No GPS, no laps. We go after the original, which is the one with your data in it.

Chapters, finally

Here's the part that's new rather than restored.

Your camera splits long recordings into chapters. A full test day doesn't come off the card as one file, it comes off as GX010969, GX020969 and so on. Link imports never handled that properly before.

Now they do. Paste one link for a chaptered session and every part comes across, in order, as a single session. We pulled a real 12.5 GB two part session through it this morning to make sure.

Nothing for you to stitch, rename or line up.

What to do

Create the link the way you always did. Open the video in the GoPro app or on gopro.com, three dots, Share, Share Link, and leave Allow Download switched on. Paste it into the analysis page.

Ignore what GoPro's own download menu offers you. That menu is still missing the original, and it doesn't matter any more.

Two things we still can't do

An edit you built in the GoPro app won't work. Edits get re-encoded when GoPro creates them, and re-encoding strips the data track out. Share the original clip instead.

And if GoPro only kept a compressed copy of a video in your cloud account, there's no original for us to fetch. Upload that one off your SD card.

Either way you'll get told which it is, rather than a spinner and a shrug.

While we were in there

Failed imports used to give you a fairly useless error. Now they tell you what actually went wrong and what to do next: link expired, still processing at GoPro's end, an edit rather than an original, file too big. Small thing. It saves an evening.

Questions, or a session that still won't behave? Discord. We read all of it.