IFC GUID Finder
Turn a GlobalId from a clash report or an issue into the actual element, with its class, storey and full properties.
Drop your IFC here
or
Large models work best on a desktop browser. Files above roughly 500.0 MB may exceed browser memory.
How it works
- 1Select an IFC file. It is read from your disk by your browser and goes no further.
- 2Paste one or more GlobalIds, one per line.
- 3Each match is resolved to its class, name, storey, object type and property sets.
- 4Anything not present in the model is listed separately, so nothing fails silently.
About IFC GUID Finder
A clash report or a BCF issue identifies an element by its GlobalId, not by its name. That is deliberate: names are not unique and change between revisions, whereas a GlobalId is meant to survive.
The problem is that a GlobalId is unreadable. 2H8df9aBv4wxRJ$mGZLpQX tells you nothing about which door on which floor is on fire. Resolving it normally means opening the model in a full application and searching by ID, which is a heavy way to answer a small question.
Pasting a whole column of GUIDs is the case this is really built for. When a checking tool returns forty failing elements, what you want is the list of what they actually are and which storeys they sit on, in one pass.
The not found list matters as much as the matches. If GlobalIds from last week's report no longer resolve, the exporter is probably regenerating them, and issue tracking across revisions will keep breaking until that is fixed.
Questions
- What is an IFC GUID?
- Every IFC object carries a GlobalId: a 22-character identifier that is meant to stay the same for that object across exports and across tools. It is how a clash report, a BCF issue or a checking tool refers to one specific element without relying on its name.
- Why is a GlobalId not found?
- Usually one of three reasons. The element was deleted or replaced since the report was produced, the report refers to a different model in a federated set, or the exporter regenerated GlobalIds so they no longer match the earlier file. The last case is worth knowing about, because it breaks issue tracking across model versions.
- Can I search more than one at a time?
- Yes. Paste one GlobalId per line. Commas, semicolons and tabs also separate them, so a column copied out of a spreadsheet or a clash report works directly.
- Is my IFC file uploaded anywhere?
- No. The file is read by your own browser using a WebAssembly IFC parser. The model is never sent to FreeBIMTools or anywhere else, and there is no upload endpoint for it.
- Why is a GlobalId 22 characters and not a normal UUID?
- IFC compresses a standard 128-bit UUID into 22 characters using its own base64 alphabet, to keep files smaller. It is the same identifier, written more compactly, which is why it looks unfamiliar next to a hyphenated UUID.
- Can it read a Revit .rvt file?
- No, and no browser tool honestly can. RVT is a proprietary format that needs Revit itself. Export an IFC from Revit and this tool will read it.