My data doesn't line up with the video

This is the question we get more than any other. You’ve picked a clip, the stickers are ticking away, and the speed on screen is clearly from the descent you did ten seconds later. Or you’re stopped at a junction in the video and the power sticker says you’re doing 300 watts. Or, most often of all, a mate filmed you and sent the clip over WhatsApp, and the data is from a completely different part of the ride.

Here’s what’s going on, and then the fix. The fix is quick. The explanation is longer, because we’d rather you understood it than took our word for it. If the clip came to you through a messaging app, skip to sent through a messaging app: that one has its own cause and its own cure.

Why it happens

Cycladat has exactly one thing to go on when it lines up a video with your ride: the time the camera says the video started. We read that from the video file, look for a Strava activity (or an imported FIT file) covering that moment, and pull the telemetry for that window. If the camera’s clock is right, the data lands on the footage to the second.

Cameras are not good at this. A few of the ways it goes wrong:

Clocks drift. Action cameras don’t have a network connection to keep their clock honest. GoPro’s own support forum is full of threads about it, and the standard advice from GoPro staff is to set the time in the camera menu or let the Quik app sync it from your phone (GoPro Support Hub). A camera that’s a few weeks past its last sync can easily be ten or twenty seconds out. That’s enough to put the wrong climb under your stickers.

Clocks reset. Leave a GoPro without a battery for a while and it forgets the date entirely. GoPro’s support team describe this as expected behaviour: “it is not unusual for the camera’s date and time to be reset if left without a battery or with a drained battery for an extended period of time” (GoPro Support Hub). Those files come out stamped 2016, and no ride of yours covers 2016.

Some exports lie on purpose. Insta360 is the worst case. Its app stamps every clip you cut from a video with the start time of the original video, so a 30-second clip from the end of a three-hour ride claims it was filmed at the start. On top of that the camera’s clock drifts unless you connect it to the phone app, which is Insta360’s own fix: “Connect the camera to the Insta360 app to automatically synchronize the time” (Insta360 online manual). We warn you when we detect an Insta360 file, because we know the match is suspect before you do.

Messaging apps throw the timestamp away. This is the one we see most. A clip that arrived on WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, Telegram or a group chat is a recompressed copy, dated when it was received, with the camera’s own record of when it was filmed stripped out. Someone else filmed you and sent it over, or you messaged it from one phone to another: same result. The section below has the fix for each app.

Edits and copies move timestamps. Trim a clip in your phone’s gallery, export it from an editor, or save it from any app that makes a new file, and the file picks up a new “created” time, and the app has nothing left to go on. This one is avoidable: import the original and trim in Cycladat, not on your phone.

None of this is something Cycladat can see from the inside. A video with a wrong timestamp looks exactly like a video with a right one. What we can do is make it easy to fix.

Slide the data along the ride

Open the clip in the editor and swipe up on the video. The trim view opens, and under the trim strip is the elevation strip: your whole ride’s elevation profile, with the slice the clip is currently using highlighted as a window.

That window is the data. Where it sits on the profile is where the app thinks you were. Move it to where you actually were.

Find the spot. You know your routes. That climb in the video is a bump on the profile. The descent after it is the drop. Tap anywhere on the strip and the window jumps there.
Watch the route. While your finger is on the strip, the ride’s GPS trace fades in over the video with a dot showing the position the data currently points at. If the dot is on the wrong road, keep sliding.
Drag to fine-tune. One finger drags the window along the ride. The stickers update live, so pick a moment in the video that’s easy to read (a stop, a sprint, the top of a climb) and drag until the numbers agree with the footage.
Pinch to zoom for precision. On a long ride a short clip is a sliver of the profile and each pixel is several seconds. Pinch with two fingers to zoom in around them. At full zoom one second of ride is a few pixels wide, so you can place the window to the second. Pinch back out to see the whole ride again.

That’s it. The offset applies to every sticker you’ve placed and any you add afterwards, and the export uses the same aligned data.

Sent through a messaging app

When you share a video in a chat, the app doesn’t send the file that was filmed. It makes a smaller copy that loads quickly inline, and throws away what the camera wrote into the original: the make and model, and the moment the recording started. The copy that lands on the other phone is dated when it was received. Cycladat reads every date it can find in the file and takes the earliest, because copies only ever move dates later, and on a chat copy the earliest date left is the download. So the app looks for a ride at nine on Tuesday evening when you were riding at eight that morning, and finds nothing, or finds a different ride. The copy is also smaller and softer than what was filmed, and that loss is permanent. The same goes for photos in photo mode.

Which apps do this:

Always: WhatsApp, Instagram messages, Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, TikTok messages, and Telegram when you send a video the normal way. Signal too, at its default quality.
Usually not, but check: iMessage. It keeps the original if Low Quality Image Mode is off (Settings, Messages; renamed Send Low Quality Photo Previews in iOS 26), but people still report 4K clips arriving as 720p depending on carrier and settings.
Never: AirDrop, a shared link from iCloud Drive, Google Drive or Dropbox, a Google Photos album at original quality, and email attachments within the size limit. These move the file as it is.

You can tell from the file name. A WhatsApp video is called something like VID-20260907-WA0012.mp4; a clip straight off an iPhone is IMG_1234.MOV, off a GoPro GX010123.MP4. In Photos, swipe up on the video: an original shows the camera it was filmed on and the time, a chat copy shows no camera and the time you received it.

Get the original across instead. Every app that compresses has a way to send the file untouched, one extra tap on the sender’s side:

WhatsApp: attach it as a Document, not from the gallery. Tap the attachment icon, choose Document, then pick the video (on iPhone you get a second option to choose from your photos). Documents go up to 2 GB and arrive exactly as sent (GSMArena on the iOS option). Download it, save it to the gallery, import that.
Telegram: attach it as a File, or pick the video and choose Send Without Compression from the three-dot menu, which is Telegram’s own advice for “videos in their original quality” (Telegram on X).
iMessage: turn off Low Quality Image Mode on the sending phone, or skip the question and AirDrop it.
Any phone to any phone: put it in iCloud Drive, Google Drive or Dropbox and share the link. Slower, and it always works.

If the chat copy is all you have, it still works. Pick the ride by hand when the app asks, then align it on the elevation strip as above. The numbers will be right once it’s placed. The lost quality stays lost, so if the original still exists on the phone that filmed it, it’s worth the extra message.

Before the next ride

Film on your phone if you can, and import the original file. If someone else is filming you, ask for it as a document, by AirDrop, or as a shared link, never as a normal chat message. It’s the one camera whose clock is always right; which camera works best ranks the rest. Set any other camera’s clock before a ride you care about. On a GoPro that’s Preferences → General → Time and Date, or open Quik with the camera connected. On an Insta360, connect it to the app. It takes ten seconds and it’s the difference between the data landing on its own and you dragging it into place.

If you’ve got a video that won’t match at all (a reset clock stamped 2016, for example), pick the ride by hand when the app asks, then align it as above.

Once the data is where it should be but the numbers still look off, that’s a different problem: see the numbers look wrong.