Click the "Select File" button above, and choose your HWR file.
You’ll see a preview, if available.
Click the "Convert file to..." button to extract text information.
Convert HWR to another file type
To convert HWR Data files to another format, you need HumminbirdPC or other GIS software.
Convert a file to HWR
To convert other file formats to the "Marine Navigation Waypoint File" file type, you need software like HumminbirdPC or a similar tool.
About HWR files
A .HWR file generally functions as either a GPS Waypoint file for marine navigation systems like Humminbird and Lowrance, or a Handwriting Recognition data file used by academic databases like NIST Special Database 19. Less commonly, it acts as a proprietary video stream format for Hikvision surveillance systems. The main disadvantage of .HWR files is their highly proprietary and fragmented nature. If you have a Humminbird GPS file, you cannot open it in standard mapping software or web browsers without specialized tools. Hikvision video files are notoriously locked down and refuse to play in standard media players. Marine users desperately need to convert .HWR to GPX or KML to share routes. Video users need standard MP4 files. Academic users need CSV or TXT. However, because these formats are often undocumented binary, standard online converters fail to process them. Often, only the original HumminbirdPC software or the Hikvision player can properly read or export the data. Our analyzer will inspect the file to show text or internal content. If our analysis detects a supported underlying or embedded format, viewing or conversion may still be possible.
Convert.Guru analyzes your HWR file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.
If you want to convert HWR file to GPX, CSV, JSON, XML, YAML, YML, TOML, INI, CFG, CONF, DAT or DB, you can use HumminbirdPC or similar software from the "GPS Waypoint and Route Storage" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….
To convert DBF, XML, SQLITE, XLSX, SQL, TSV, ACCDB, YAML, MDB, CSV, ODS or JSON files to HWR, try HumminbirdPC or another comparable tool in the "GPS Waypoint and Route Storage" category.
The HWR Converter Story
The history of Convert.Guru began over 25 years ago in California with Tom Simondi’s file-format database. A former contributor to Space Shuttle development and a software pioneer of the 1980s, Simondi established a trusted resource for file type analysis that was even referenced by Microsoft Windows XP. Today, we use modern technology to process and convert thousands of file formats while continually improving our HWR converter.