GoPro's share links have lost their download button

What changed at our end

We were pressing the same Download button you'd press. When GoPro took it away, we had nothing to press.

So we stopped pressing buttons. We now ask your GoPro account for the original file directly, the same file the button used to hand over. Same video, same hidden data track, same lap times.

One thing came free with the rebuild. Long sessions that your camera split into chapters used to be awkward. Now they arrive as a single session, stitched in the right order, with nothing for you to line up by hand.

Nothing for you to change. If you tried a link in August and gave up, try it again.

What was actually broken

GoPro share links used to carry a Download button for whoever you sent them to. That button has gone.

Open one of your links today and you get a Share option, a three dot menu with Get Info and Report tucked inside, and that's your lot. Look for a download and you'll find a compressed copy at best.

How we knew it wasn't your settings

The obvious conclusion was that you forgot to tick Allow Download when you made the link.

We went back through links our own pipeline had already downloaded from successfully in July. Same links, still live, still playing, nobody had touched them since. The Download button had vanished from those too.

A link built weeks ago, that provably worked at the time, can't have been broken by the way it was created. Something changed at GoPro's end, and it reached backwards into links that already existed.

Our last successful GoPro link import before the rebuild was the 26th of July. Racers started posting about the same thing on r/gopro around the 3rd of August. That lines up.

Does making a fresh link in the Quik app fix it?

It never did, and it still isn't necessary.

That was the workaround doing the rounds in August, and it was an easy assumption to make, that the phone app and the website must work differently under the skin. Racers creating links in Quik with Allow Download ticked landed on the same empty share page.

Do still tick Allow Download when you create a link. That part matters.

Will I lose my GPS data if I upload the video myself?

No. Uploading the file directly has always worked and always will.

The share link was never doing anything clever behind the scenes. It fetches the original file from GoPro, then hands it to the same telemetry extractor that any normal upload goes through. Same file, same code, same GPS, same lap times. The link exists so you don't have to push a big video up twice. That's the whole of it.

What does destroy your telemetry

Re-encoding. That's the one to watch, and it has nothing to do with any of this.

Your GPS, accelerometer and gyro data sits in a hidden metadata track inside the MP4, alongside the picture and the sound. Copy the file and it comes along for the ride. Squeeze the file through a compressor and it's gone.

So, in order of how safe they are:

• Pull the .MP4 straight off the SD card with a card reader. Cleanest route there is.
• Paste a GoPro Cloud share link. Working again as of September.
• Saving out of the GoPro app is fine too, as long as it's the original and you haven't trimmed it first.
• Don't send the clip to yourself through WhatsApp, iMessage or Google Photos. They'll quietly re-compress it on the way, and your telemetry won't survive the trip.

That last one catches more people than everything else we see put together. The video arrives, it plays perfectly, and there's not a single data point left in it.

One case we still can't rescue

If you share an edit you made in the GoPro app rather than the original clip, there's no telemetry left to find. Edits get re-encoded when GoPro builds them, which strips the data track out, same as WhatsApp would.

Share the original clip from your camera roll and you're fine. If you paste an edit, we'll tell you what happened rather than leaving you guessing.

In the meantime

Nothing downstream cares how the video got to us. Lap times, sector splits, the coaching, your overlays. All the same whichever route you take.

And if you hit a wall with a session, come and tell us on Discord. We'd much rather hear about it than have you quietly give up on a good set of laps.