Track the movies you watch, in a database you own

The full walkthrough, from empty install to a working collection — or read on for the written version.

The problem with logging films on a service

Letterboxd is a good product, and this is not an argument that it is badly made. It is an argument about where your history lives. Ten years of viewing notes on a hosted service is ten years of dependency: the service has to keep running, keep its terms, and keep the features you rely on out from behind a paywall.

To be fair, Letterboxd does let you export your data as CSV, and that matters. But an export is a backup, not a collection. A CSV of titles and dates is not something you can browse on a plane, filter by mood, or extend with a field it never had. The moment you actually need it, you are rebuilding somewhere else from scratch.

The question is not whether you can get your data out. It is whether you ever needed to ask.

What "you own it" means here

In LifeTracker, your collection is a SQLite file sitting in your own storage. That is the entire storage model — there is no server copy that is the real one. Practical consequences:

• It works with no connection. The only online step is searching a title, which pulls the poster and metadata once. After that the entry is local and self-contained.
• No account to create. You open the app and start. Registration only exists for the optional cloud plan, which adds sync and backup across devices.
• It is queryable. On desktop the database is a plain SQLite file: open it in any SQLite browser and ask it questions no app menu offers — how many films you watched per year, say.
• Backup is a file copy. On desktop, whatever you already use for backups covers it, with no export step to remember.

Setting up a movie collection

LifeTracker organises everything into categories, and ships with a Movies template so you are not building fields by hand.

1. Create the category. Pick the Movies template, then a style preset — the preset only changes how entries are displayed, and you can change it later without touching your data.
2. Add your first film. Search it by title. The poster and metadata come from an online film database, and are copied into your local one on save.
3. Set a priority. This is simply how much you want to see it. It is what turns a flat watchlist into something ordered by actual interest.
4. Leave the rest empty. Fields like Date watched and Rating are for later. An unfinished entry is a normal state, not a gap to fill.

Filters do the sorting for you

The template comes with two filters, and they are the part worth understanding, because they replace the manual list-shuffling that most trackers make you do.

A film is either something you mean to watch or something you have watched — there is no middle state to track, which is why the template does not carry one. Collections that do need it, like series or games, add a Current filter for what is under way.

You never move an entry between these lists. Setting the date you watched it is the whole action: the film leaves your watchlist and joins your history by itself. A filter is a stored condition, not a folder — nothing here is bookkeeping you have to maintain.

What the template already tracks

Beyond the title, poster and the fields you would expect, a few come pre-wired:

• Genres and release year, filled in automatically from the film database when you pick a title.
• Waiting since — how long a film has been sitting on your watchlist, which is the number that tends to shame you into finally watching it.
• A comment before and after: why you added it, and what you thought once you had seen it. Keeping them apart is the difference between a watchlist and a diary.

Fields you can add yourself

The rest is yours to define, which is where a general-purpose tracker pulls ahead of a specialised one:

• Which physical copy you own, and who currently has it on loan.
• Where you watched it, and who with.
• A rewatch counter, with a separate rating per viewing.
• Whether it is on a streaming service you already pay for.

And because LifeTracker is not a film app, the same database also holds your books, games, shows and habits. One tool, one file, one backup.

An honest comparison

There are real reasons to prefer a dedicated service, and pretending otherwise would not help you decide.

If what you enjoy is the community — reading other people's reviews, following friends, discovering through a feed — a hosted service does that and LifeTracker does not. It is a private ledger, not a social network. Plenty of people run both: the service for the conversation, a local database for the record they intend to keep.

Frequently asked questions