When a chronology outgrows a spreadsheet, a slide or a Gantt chart: what Boromlia does differently, what it does not do, and when another tool is better.
Most timelines start in a tool built for something else: a spreadsheet, a slide or a project plan. Each of those is good at its own job. Boromlia is built for the job they leave to you, which is keeping a dated record of what happened, with its places, photos and sources, and reading it back every way you need.
One record, read every way. You enter each event once. The same events draw as a River, Cards, a Map and Spans, and on Advanced as a Ribbon, a Log and a Doc. Switching style changes how the record reads, never what it holds, so nothing is typed twice.
Every event carries its evidence. An event has a date, a place with real coordinates, photos, rich text, people and tags, and a source in a field of its own. "Has a source" is one of the filters, so the events with nothing behind them are easy to find.
Dates are data, not drawing. Single dates and ranges sit on one shared axis, so a two-week phase and a single decision line up, with a time of day when it matters and BC for dates before the common era. The scale runs from seconds to years, set per timeline.
Photos and places come in on their own. Upload up to 300 photographs at once and the bulk upload reads the date and the GPS position out of each file, looks up the place, and groups them into events, so a trip or a site visit arrives already dated and placed.
Private until you publish. A timeline is private to your account until you choose otherwise. A shared link is read-only unless you let the people holding it add events, needs no account, and is kept out of search engines. A public timeline is a page anybody can read and find, and on Advanced one iframe tag puts it inside another site.
It comes out as easily as it goes in. Print the current style as an A4 PDF, export a CSV of every field, or download the photos as a zip with a manifest. The record is never locked inside the drawing.
Each of these is the right tool for some job. At a glance:
A timeline that lives in a spreadsheet today can come across in one go on Advanced: save it as CSV or TSV, match its columns to the event fields, and check every row in the preview before anything is saved. Up to 1,000 rows go in at a time. Photos are not carried in the file, so they are added afterwards, and the bulk upload dates and places them for you.
Or start small. Every account begins with one free timeline of up to 20 events, with no card and no time limit, which is enough to see whether your record reads better as a timeline than as rows.