Have you every wanted to go back and find an activity on Strava on your smartphone from years ago and noticed that there was no way to search for a specific activity and you had to endlessly scroll to find it? I definitely have but Strava has just released a new feature on mobile that’s going to make it much easier to find specific activities that you’ve done in the past.
Previously, the only way to be able to search and find a specific activity on Strava was through a web browser but today that changes with new search functionality on mobile that’s rolling out for all users.
You can now find a specific activity from either the Activities list or the Training section in your profile.
There’s now this new little magnifying glass icon in the upper right hand corner. Click that and it brings up a new search page where you can search by activity title or description. Just enter some text and up pops the activities that match. Simple as that.
But that’s only the tip of the iceberg – there’s also new search filters for the type of sport, distance, time, elevation, date range, and workout type. Like here I’ll choose alpine ski, and boom! There’s all the downhill skiing I’ve done.
Same thing with distance – let’s say I want to see just the activities where I’ve gone over 60 miles.
There’s also a time filter, elevation gain filter, you can filter a certain date range, and then by your workout type whether that was a long run, workout, or race. And you can combine all these filters together for a very refined search.
What I like about this is that the search is really fast – nearly instantaneous with those filters. I just move the slider and the results are populated nearly immediately.
Tips for better searchability
To make your search easier it will be beneficial to have good titles and descriptions with some pertinent keywords that can help you find your activity. I’m definitely guilty of just putting in something vague like “Happy Trails” but that doesn’t help me at all if I’m trying to find an activities where I rode at Coyote Ridge which is where this ride was at.
Caveats
You may notice though that it doesn’t necessarily show photos from all your activities but I think this is totally understandable because this helps keep the search fast and doesn’t overload the servers or zap bandwidth. But one odd little thing is that it does appear to display photos for indoor activities that you’ve manually uploaded. This feature just came out today so this could change in the future.
Another thing is that I do wish that it only listed the sports that you’ve actually done though in the sport list and didn’t display the activities that I haven’t done, like let’s say Windsurfing. It would just make it a little faster to search through activity type.
And one last thing is that I wish there was a filter for Relative Effort.
If for some reason you don’t have this functionality, make sure your Strava app is updated to at least version 189 and you should be good to go. Funny enough, Strava didn’t really mention this in the release notes but just note it’s version 189 or newer.
With that, ride on!
