Revit writes a journal of everything that happens in a session — every command, every sync, every crash — in a script only Autodesk support can read. Chronicle turns it into plain language: pick any session, or several, and read the whole story on a filterable timeline, then export a post-mortem anyone can open. And while you work, it quietly records what changes on every sync, so “who deleted this?” finally has an answer.
Every session, Revit writes journal.NNNN.txt — the full record of the day, in a replay script meant for a machine. When a model crashes or a wall vanishes, the answer is in that file; the file might as well be encrypted.
Chronicle is read-only end to end — it reads files Revit already wrote, and records to its own local store. It never touches the model.
Click Chronicle — no model needed. It scans every installed Revit version's Journals folder in the background, with a real progress readout, and lists the sessions grouped by project, model or user. Each row is named by the model, never the journal number; it carries a verdict dot — green clean, amber worth a look, red no clean exit — plus the user, date, duration and action count. Tick one session or five: the whole week of a model, or one user's day across models, merges into a single story.
“Synchronised with central.” “Loaded family Door-Handle-Lever.” “Error reported — 1 error(s), 2 warning(s).” Every action lands on the timeline, colour-coded by category, newest first, searchable. Escape-key and zoom churn is classed as noise and hidden by default — one tick brings it back. Above it, the verdict: how often the session synchronised and the longest gap, warnings and errors, and whether the journal ends with a clean close. The flags are honest sentences — “Last sync was 52m before the session ended — unsaved work may be at risk.”
While you work, Chronicle captures what every sync changed — created, modified, deleted — clustered per sync and per user, so a sync three people fed shows three correctly attributed bands. Select an element and its history follows; the Deleted card names the deleter when the record knows, and says “Unknown” when it honestly doesn't. Two switches — Live Activity and History — sit right on the cards, mirrored live with the Lens panel.
Chronicle's record is written on your machine, from what your own syncs saw — and your colleague's machine keeps its own. Point the project at a shared folder and every collaborator publishes the rows they authored there and reads back everybody else's — one combined history, deduplicated, every row still carrying its real author. The path lives inside the model, so a teammate opening the central inherits it with nothing to set up on their own machine, and emptying it stops the sharing.
Paste or type the full path of a shared / network folder. Every collaborator's Lens will publish its own changes there and read the others' — so the whole team sees one combined history. The path is stored IN THE MODEL, so teammates inherit it automatically; nobody has to set it up on their own machine. Leave it empty to stop sharing.
A change is only knowable against something. The first sync on a project makes Chronicle read the model whole — once, ever — and it does it in the open: the model on the phase line, the element being read on the step line, a bar that moves, and a Cancel that costs nothing because whatever has been photographed is kept and the next sync carries on from there. Every sync after that is a comparison, not a scan.
Chronicle is photographing the model as it stands, so that from your next sync it can tell you what changed and who changed it. Once per project — you can stop it, and whatever it has already photographed is kept.
Compare against the last sync, this session — or any sync the record holds. Chronicle totals created, modified and deleted, lists the most-changed categories each with a one-click Select, and paints the model: created green, modified amber, everything untouched ghosted. Toggles isolate each group while the paint is on, and clearing it puts the view back exactly as it was.
Open a model with worksets closed and everything inside them is invisible: nothing there is recorded and no deletion is reported for it. Rather than let the counts read as a complete account, an amber strip above every card names the worksets and says what is missing. A model detached from central has no shared identity to file a history under, and the strip says that too — because an empty card and a blind one are different answers.
Autodesk usernames are email addresses, and a history written in them is a history nobody reads out loud. One window renames every person once, and the timeline, the sync bands and the Deleted card all follow. The same window sets how hard the recorder works — how often it asks central who is editing, how long somebody counts as active, how many past sessions the journal loads — and whether you appear in the feed at all.
Everything that used to sit behind the little gears — in one place. Changes save automatically. Turn the whole feature on or off with the I/O switch in the Chronicle header.
Replace the long Autodesk usernames with names you choose. Applies to Live Activity and History.
Share this project’s change history with the team. Pick a shared / network folder — it is stored in the model, so every collaborator syncs through it automatically.
One click exports the combined timeline as a single HTML file — no install, no internet, works offline. Session status, duration, syncs, warnings and errors up top; a written summary; the sync-cadence strip; the full filterable timeline and the most-used commands. Mail it to whoever asked “what happened on Thursday?” — they need a browser, not Revit. The report below is a real one.
This is an actual HTML report Chronicle exports — self-contained, works offline, shareable as one file. Scroll it right here, or open it full-screen.
Chronicle ships on the QA / QC panel of the BIMIO tab. Open any session — even from months ago — read it in plain language, and export the post-mortem. Read-only, always. Revit 2024–2027, full trial, no card.