Objem bulk updater for Strava: a user guide

Strava has many wonderful features, but it’s ability to handle lots of your GPS tracks at once is not one of them. The training log is very pretty and the “My Activities” page just about bearable for viewing batches of 20 things at a time, but if you want to do things like flag a bunch of forty rides as commutes or record that you used your new shoes on every run in the last month, you’re in for a painful few hours of clicking.

Fear not, for I’m about to show you objem – a Strava bulk updater.

(If you’re wondering about the name, it either means “volume” in Czech or “hug” in Slovene. Or something else beyond the wit of wiktionary.)

What is objem?

Objem is a Strava app; a standalone thing that you grant permission to read and interact with your Strava data. It allows you to make basic changes to multiple activities in one go, rather than editing each one individually. It’s a little buggy, but it is only a beta.

To see your apps, go to the settings page on Strava (hover over your profile picture), then select My Apps. You’ll see something like this screen:

You can manage access from here. If you find objem useful you can also get back to it from here by selecting “visit website” (particularly handy if the name “objem” isn’t something that sticks in your mind…). If you decide it’s not for you, you can revoke permission for objem to see your data from here as well.

Getting objem

Go here: https://objem-app.appspot.com/

Connect with Strava.

You’re done!

Using Objem

I’m going to work through an example. I happen to know that I didn’t flag a bunch of rides as commutes earlier this year, and that some are also recorded against the wrong bike. I’d like to fix this.

First, I’m going to go to VeloViewer (another app that excels in slicing and dicing your Strava data which I talked about briefly here). You don’t need use VeloViewer if you know what activities you want to update, but it makes the workflow a little easier if you’re unsure.

From the activities page in VeloViewer, I’m going to filter on rides in the last year that aren’t flagged as commutes. Expand the filter box to do that; you’ll have to manually add the commute filter by selecting “commute” from the add filter dropdown and hitting that big red plus icon.

This gives me a bunch of rides. I know most of these are commutes because of the time, distance, and because I don’t give my commutes specific titles. Let’s flag these as commutes.

A quick caution before we go further: there’s no warning box in objem that tells you how many activities you’re about to update, nor is there an undo. Take care!

With that in mind, I’m going to update things in batches of ten rides at a time.

Let’s go back to Objem. First we need to set the if clause to identify which rides we want to update. We pick the appropriate timezone, then the date range (note the date range is in ISO format: YYYY-MM-DD), then the activity types:

Any activities that match these filters will be updated.

In the second half of the screen, we then set what changes we want to make. We tick the commute checkbox, then set that to true:

If we leave a checkbox unticked (for example the gear dropdown), Objem will leave that particular bit alone.

Doublecheck everything, then execute. You should get a helpful green confirmation:

If you get a red failure check that you haven’t done something daft like got your filter dates the wrong way round. If everything looks OK, try updating fewer activities in one go. If nothing makes it work, go and have a cup of tea and try again later. This is a beta, after all.

By adjusting the date filters I can work all the way back and correct all my data. Where I needed to change the bike and flag commute, I just checked both those boxes for the relevant rides.

If there’s a single ride you don’t want to update in a bunch of others, I find it’s quicker to update everything with Objem then use the little Strava icon to the left of the ride title in the VeloViewer list to jump straight to the Strava ride and edit it back. That’s also a neat way of checking that the rides you were expecting to have updated actually have.