Family Library

Family Library moves loadable families between a Revit project and a library of folders on disk. The export side lists every family in the project as a tree you can tick — grouped the way Revit's own Project Browser groups them, by category then family then type, or flat by family name when you know what a family is called but not where it lives. Switching between the two groupings keeps every tick you have already made. You can narrow the tree to what is currently selected in the model and re-read that selection at any time without closing the window, filter it by name, or hide everything you have not ticked. Each checked family is written out as one .rfa into a repository folder, either flat, grouped into a folder per category, or a folder per family, and the export never modifies the project it reads from. The export also cleans up after Revit. Every time Revit saves a family it leaves a numbered backup beside it — Door.0001.rfa — and there is no API switch that turns this off, only a minimum of one. Family Library caps the backups and then sweeps them, and it does so carefully, because a backup is not identifiable from its name alone: a library full of version-stamped families like Curtain Panel.2024.rfa is entirely ordinary, and matching on the name would permanently delete real content with no recycle bin to recover it from. The automatic sweep therefore compares the folder before and after the save and removes only what appeared in between, so a family genuinely named Door.0001 sitting beside the one you exported survives untouched. A manual clean-up over a whole repository is available separately. Importing reads the repositories you have pointed at and tells you what is actually in them before you load anything. Every .rfa is listed with the Revit release it was saved in, read from the file's own header rather than guessed from its name or date, and families saved in a newer Revit than the one you are running are flagged and held back up front — Revit cannot open them at all, so the alternative is each one failing separately half way through a long run. Families already present in the project are marked as such, and Revit's own backup files are never listed. Where a family keeps its types in a type catalog beside it, Family Library reads that catalog and asks which types you want, the same question Revit's own Load Family asks, instead of pushing several hundred unwanted types into your project. Loading a family that is already in the project is a decision Revit insists on rather than an optional nicety, so Family Library puts it in front of you: take the library's parameter values, keep the values already in the project and take only the geometry, or skip anything already loaded so only genuinely new families come in. Each family is imported in its own transaction, which means a single family that fails to load cannot roll back the ones that already succeeded, cancelling a long import keeps everything loaded so far, and each family appears in Revit's undo stack under its own name. Both sides report per family when they finish, both show real progress and can be cancelled between families, and the window stays responsive throughout because families are opened and closed one at a time rather than all at once. Nothing phones home: no licence check, no telemetry, and no internet connection is ever required. Full installation and step-by-step instructions are in the Documentation tab.