Batch upgrade families

[Marcus.Isacsson]

Hi fellas!

I wonder if anoyone of you have any tips for batch upgrading families?
Useful when going from Revit 2017 to Revit 2018 and you want a copy of your family folders with upgraded families.

We often have some long running projects continuing in Revit 2017 when some newer ones are started in Revit 2018 and so on.

In a perfect world a plugin checking last changed dates would be nea: 
- 2017 version exists but not 2018 version: Family simply gets updated and copied to new folder. 
- 2017 version is the latest: Family gets copied to the family folder for 2018 and files are overwritten.

- 2018 version is the latest: Family from 2017 folder doesn't get copied and nothing gets overwritten.

[L.Maas]

In general we have a folder (e.g. Revit Families) which contain our own Revit families. With the arrival of a new Revit version we backup this folder to an archive and to another folder e.g. Revit 2017 Families. The ones in the Revit Families folders are batch upgraded to the latest Revit version (e.g. 2018).

This does few things for us.

Families inside a project "remember" from which folder they were loaded.

So if the project is updated to the new Revit version (which we do in most cases) it keeps reloading the families from the same (upgraded) families folder.

If the project is not upgraded and tries by accident to reload from that folder it gets an error (newer files). In that case the user knows/remembers he has to point the reloading to the other families folder (e.g. Revit 2017 Families).

Because we keep families folders for previous Revit versions it is easy to keep track of them and restore a family if something went wrong.

However your case might be different

[Marcus.Isacsson]

Thanks for your answer! Questions:
- What do you use to upgrade the families to the latest version?
- How do you keep track of new families created in an earlier version? 

For example a family could be copied to Revit 2018 then updated there. But you also know that new families have been made in Revit 2017 so you decide do batch upgrade one more time. If you batch upgrade you will overwrite the changes in made in the Revit 2018 folder(?). 

[L.Maas]

I now use our own add-in that can (batch) update our families. However you can use the batch upgrade scripts. See THIS thread which also contains scripts for batch upgrading.

We do not really keep track of new families made in previous versions. We rely upon the experience of our users. For example. If they create a family in a previous version and he/she thinks it might be useful for future use they hand it over to a modeller who can modify it according to our standards and add it to the relevant libraries. So in general we do only a batch upgrade when a new Revit version comes out, upgrade our complete family library. After that we look on a family by family basis what to do with it. An in case something goes wrong we have backups to fall back upon

[loboarch · Accepted solution]

Here is a link to another forum where someone has built a batch upgrade tool via Dynamo. Pretty straight forward.

https://www.revitforum.org/dynamo-bim/36261-bulk-upgrade-families.html

[Erling_ARK-NET]

There is another way of doing this.

I have installed the plug-in JOTools.

This plug-in can mass load and mass save families.

It takes a lot of time, because revit is upgrading one family at a time.

I went home, and left my computer on for the weekend.

[Ric_Weber]

I want to mention if you haven't already heard about it, using Content Catalog.  As long as you have access to ACC Docs (soon to be Forma Data Management) you can use Content Catalog.  Your Revit project model files do not need to be on ACC to use the insert capability, but you do have to have ACC Docs to have access to and use the tool.   Upload your families in the older versions and they automatically upgrade.  Drag and drop entire folder structures to upload the files and all of the folder names become Tags on the files which can be searched and filtered.   No more needing to wonder what folder any particular family is in, it's all in one "bucket" and searchable by name, tag, category, several other options.  Give it a try, I think you'll really like it.    I did a Best Practices webinar with Autodesk last year...  check it out: https://boards.autodesk.com/workflow-wednesdays/items/content-catalog-best-practices-november-19-202...