GoPro's share links have lost their download button

If you've tried to bring a GoPro Cloud link into Race Ninja in the last couple of weeks, it won't have worked. Here's what's going on, because it isn't you, and there's nothing you can toggle to fix it.

What's 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. No download, anywhere on the page.

Which is a problem for us, because fetching the link is exactly how our GoPro Cloud import works. We open your link, press Download, pull the original file. No button, nothing to press, no video.

How we know it isn't your settings

This is the bit worth reading, because the obvious conclusion is 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 has touched them since. The Download button has 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 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?

No. We wish it did.

This is the workaround doing the rounds at the moment, and it's an easy assumption to make, that the phone app and the website must work differently under the skin. But racers creating links in Quik with Allow Download ticked are landing on the same empty share page. We haven't seen a single case where going through the app brought the button back.

Save yourself the hour.

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

No. This one comes up constantly, so it's worth being properly clear about.

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

Upload the file yourself and you get identical results.

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.
• 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.

When's it coming back?

We don't know, and we'd rather tell you that than make something up.

Some racers say GoPro support has told them it's being worked on. We can't verify that, so we're not going to repeat it as fact. What we can tell you is that we're checking, and the moment that button comes back, GoPro links will start working here again with nothing for you to do. That's why we've left the import form exactly where it was rather than pulling it off the page.

We'll update this post when it changes.

In the meantime

Upload your original file and everything works as it always did. Lap times, sector splits, the coaching, your overlays. Nothing downstream cares how the video got to us.

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.