Swimming Watch tools

This site is looking for sponsorship

Unfortunately the owner of Metroapps has now got a full-time job developing high-technology transport software and has no spare time beyond the job and swimming, and the side-business has not been developed. The company has been closed with the few remaining assets (including this site) transferred back to the owner.

This tool is extremely outdated. Although it still performs well and still does what it was intended to, it now relies on a PHP extension which only works on PHP 7, which has already gone EOL, and is due for a complete rewrite. This tool will remain as-is and there will not be any enhancements until a sponsor described below is found, as long as it can edit the swim activities on my Garmin watch.

Swim Data Analyser is a potential sponsor for this tool but it currently doesn't have export functionality yet. The maintainer will cooperate with them for the modernisation work.

Getting a copy of your activity file

The most convenient way to get a copy of your data, is to export it from Garmin Connect. You can do this by going to the activity page, clicking on the gear icon to the left, and selecting 'export as original' as shown below.

how to export from Garmin Connect

When you're ready, Go to the upload page and start editing your data.

Editing Activities

After an activity has been uploaded, you'll see a bar chart. Each bar is showing how long (in seconds) you took to swim a length. The color of the bar indicates the stroke. The tool uses the same color scheme as Garmin Connect. On the same chart, you'll see a black line showing average time per length, with labels for intervals and rests.

Above the chart is a toolbar with buttons, which should be self explanatory.

How to use the Editor graph

At the bottom, a status bar shows a summary including total swim time, distance, average speed, and average stroke/length. This summary will be updated as you make changes to the data.

If you swam a lot of lengths (more than 20) a scrollbar will appear at the bottom of the chart.

Then, you'll have to identify inaccuracies:

To make a change, select a length by clicking on it. Once it is selected, it will change appearance. After selection is made, click on one of the 4 action buttons on the toolbar. Sometimes, one or more buttons will be grayed because the action can't be done on the selected length.

If you change stroke, you'll be presented with a dialog box

Change Stroke Dialog

Choose the new stroke and decide if you want to this new stroke applied to selected length only, lengths in the same interval, or all lengths.

When you are happy with the results, download the new activity file to your computer by clicking the done button and download link.

Uploading the new activity file to Garmin Connect

Login to your Garmin Connect account. Go to Activity list by selecting 'Activities' from the main menu, and delete the version of the activity that was uploaded by Garmin Express (the one with errors).

Garmin Connect activities menu

Important: Garmin Connect doesn't allow two versions of the same activity in your account. This is why you have to delete the original version of the activity before you upload the new one. Be aware that by deleting the activity, you will lost any custom information you added that is not part of the data file, like activity name, comments etc.

After the original activity is deleted, click on the cloud icon at the top left of the page, and select 'Import data'

Garmin Connect import link

Click the 'Browse' link, select the new activity file, and click the 'Import Data' button.