Filmlog is a film diary, a research tool, a soundtrack player and a cinema finder, on top of everything it has been since 2013: it records what you watched, when, where and what you thought of it. It is built by one person, paid for by the people who use it, and the library stays on your own devices and in iCloud.
This page walks the app the way somebody meets it, rather than summarising it. It is the same tour a new user gets, which is the point: it shows the product as the people using it will see it. Pick a platform below to follow that platform's path through the app.
Coming soon: Filmlog for Mac. Filmlog 2026.9 is available for iPhone, iPad and Apple TV; the Mac part of this walkthrough describes the app as it will be released.
There is no account to create and no sign-in step. The app opens, the lists are empty, and you are guided through the first steps on how to follow people to see their upcoming film releases. Nothing asks for a permission until the moment it is genuinely needed: location only when you first look for a cinema near you, notifications only when you turn them on, Apple Music only when you first open a soundtrack. Filmlog speaks 32 languages and picks yours from the device, film titles included.
Search for the film you watched tonight, open it, and log it as seen. The entry carries a watch date, today by default and changeable to any date. The single most important thing to understand about the diary is that each viewing is its own entry, not a flag on a film. Watch a film tonight and again in nine years and you have two entries, each with its own date, note and cinema.
You do not have to know when you watched it. A film you saw sometime in the nineties can be logged with no date at all: Filmlog would rather record "seen, date unknown" than invent a date for you. Undated entries live in the All view; the Diary is chronological and shows the entries that have a date to sort by.
Opening a film gives you cast and crew, runtime, release dates including your country's, the title in your language, and a plot summary with a spoiler-free overview beside it, so you can read about a film you have not seen without having it ruined. Sources are credited on the page: film data and plot text from TMDB, biographical and production facts from Wikidata. Both are open data, maintained by their communities: anything wrong or missing can be corrected at the source, on wikidata.org or themoviedb.org, and the correction reaches everyone, not only Filmlog.
From here you can watch the trailer in the browser, look at the poster full screen and browse alternative ones, open the film in another service, and share it. Where a film's score was released as an album, the soundtrack sits on the page and plays through Apple Music: full tracks with a subscription, roughly thirty-second previews without one, and the web link to the album either way. Where no album exists, no soundtrack is offered, so you never open onto an empty screen.
Films you mean to see go on the watchlist, which sorts itself into Announced, Upcoming and Released, so "I could watch this tonight" is visibly separate from "this is out next spring". Filmlog records when you added each film, which makes "oldest additions first" a durable sort rather than a guess. Marking something seen converts the row into a diary entry rather than duplicating it.
Links from filmlog.cc do not barge into your library. A film or challenge somebody shares with you lands in the Inbox and waits there until you add it and/or dismiss it.
The Watched tab holds two views of the same data. Diary is chronological with date pills, one line per viewing, so a rewatch appears twice. All is one row per film with a count when you have seen it more than once, and it is where undated entries live. Both sort several ways, and switching between them keeps your scroll position.
Filmlog gives you three ways to express appreciation and you pick exactly one: hearts, which are free and the default; five stars in half-star steps; or ten whole points. Choosing a star scale hides the hearts everywhere and vice versa, but switching never destroys anything — both are stored, so a mode you come back to later is exactly as you left it. In a star mode you also set the threshold for what counts as highly rated, which statistics and filters then use in place of the heart.
Notes attach to a single viewing, not to the film. A note on tonight's rewatch does not overwrite what you wrote the first time, which for a diary meant to last decades is the whole point.
A diary entry can record the people you watched with, picked from your contacts the first time and found in Filmlog's own search after that. They stay local rows in your library: Filmlog does not go looking for accounts, and your companions do not need the app. Company belongs to the evening rather than to the film, so a film you saw twice with different people remembers both. Filmlog keeps only a name and a small picture, copied at the moment you pick somebody.
It can also record the cinema, chosen from a real place rather than typed as free text, so "the Rex, 2019" becomes somewhere with its own page listing everything you saw there. You can pin the two or three you actually go to, and pins travel to your other devices. Finding a cinema near you uses a single-shot location button: you tap it, it answers once, and that is the whole extent of it.
Around 315,000 films and 464,000 people ship inside the app. Search works on a plane, in a cinema basement, and in your own language; online lookups fill in the rest when you have a connection, but they are the fallback rather than the mechanism.
Films can be found by title, in your language and the original, and also by what they are about: 3,438 narrative locations, meaning where a story is set rather than where it was shot; 9,679 subjects; and 11,654 source works, the novel, play or article a film was based on. Each opens a screen listing every film that shares it.
People covers cast and crew, 4,590 fictional characters, and your own watch companions. This scope holds the least obvious strength in the app: alongside the people the film databases know about, the catalogue carries roughly 110,000 cast and crew members that TMDB has no entry for at all — silent-era directors, regional crew, composers credited as a duo. They are searchable offline and rank below the established results, so searching "kubrick" still puts Stanley first.
Anyone in a film's cast or crew has a page with their filmography and their appearances as separate lists, a progress bar showing how much of it you have seen and how much you loved, and biographical facts from Wikidata. Follow somebody and their upcoming films start appearing in Releases.
Upcoming and recent theatrical releases with your country's dates rather than the American ones, plus Discover rows that suggest things to watch. It refreshes in the background, so it is current when you open the app. Tap the bell to be notified about upcoming films with a lead time you choose, including films from the people you follow.
A challenge is a list of films with progress tracking: the fifty you mean to get through this year, a director's complete work, a friend's recommendations. Challenges hold up to 101 films. The free tier gets one; Plus makes them unlimited.
Sharing a challenge produces a filmlog.cc link that anyone can open with or without the app. Two things about that link are worth knowing. The whole challenge is packed into the link itself, so nothing about it is stored on a server: sharing a list leaves no record anywhere. And what travels is the list, never your progress — whoever accepts it gets a copy of their own starting at zero, with its own start date. There is no shared scoreboard and no live connection between the two copies.
Building a hundred-film list by tapping films one at a time is unreasonable, so every list in the app carries a button that adds the whole thing at once. A pre-flight sheet settles which films and which challenge, then you get checkboxes with search, sorting, and bulk actions such as "select only the ones I have not seen". Every one of those stops at the target challenge's remaining room rather than silently overflowing it, and films already in that challenge appear dimmed in their own section so you cannot re-add them by accident.
If you have been logging films somewhere else, Filmlog imports it. Analysis and the review screen are free and committing the result needs Plus, so you can see exactly what would happen before deciding. It reads Letterboxd exports, whole data exports as well as individual lists, IMDb exports and Filmtipset. For anything else it works through column-name synonyms, then sniffs the values themselves, and on devices with Apple Intelligence it will ask the on-device model to interpret a format it has never seen, then check that suggestion against the actual values rather than trusting it.
Films are matched offline against the bundled catalogue and sorted into matched, needs review and unmatched, with a screen for fixing the middle group by hand. On real exports, automatic resolution measures at 98% for Letterboxd, 98% for IMDb and 91% for id-only exports. Three properties keep a bad import from ruining a library: it merges, and running it twice changes nothing the second time; it never invents a watch date; and it is films only, because Filmlog has no concept of a television series. A Filmlog backup imports the same way, merging into the library you already have without overwriting it.
The Statistics screen covers your activity, what you have watched, and what you have not. Tiles load themselves and rearrange to the window, and each one can be set to its own timespan, so a five-year view and a this-month view sit side by side. Two of them are the reason to open the screen at all: the Patterns heatmap, which shows when the watching actually happens — the weeknights, the holidays, the fallow months — and the Breakdown tile, which slices the same library five different ways. Free users see the screen with the numbers blurred, so you can tell what you would be getting. There is a widget for each statistic, in three sizes, and tapping one opens the matching screen.
Log Film, Add to Watchlist and Add to Favorites are available as Shortcuts actions and as spoken phrases, and they work with the app closed. Your library is indexed into system search, so typing a film's title into Spotlight finds your entry, with its watch date, whether it is a favourite and who you watched it with. Challenges are indexed too, and your notes are indexed as searchable text without being shown in the result line. Only your own library is indexed; the 315,000-film catalogue is not, so Spotlight stays about your films.
On iOS 27 and later this also lets Siri and Apple Intelligence answer questions about your library. That part is not available in the European Union, where Apple has delayed Siri AI under the Digital Markets Act with no announced date. It is available in the EU on the Mac Coming soon. Spotlight search of your library works everywhere, on every platform.
Filmlog follows iOS 26's Liquid Glass design and respects Reduce Motion and Reduce Transparency. Plus adds two alternative app icons by Walter Wunderlich, each in a light, a dark and a tinted variant, a choice of which tab the app opens on, and tile and layout options for the lists. VoiceOver is supported throughout.
The iPad runs a two-pane layout, list on the left and detail on the right, holding up through rotation and Split View, with keyboard shortcuts across navigation, lists and detail actions.
Export, backup and restore are free, and that is deliberate: your library is never held hostage to a subscription. Multi-device support keeps the same library on your iPhone, iPad and Mac Coming soon — entries, ratings, notes, cinema pins, challenges, all of it — and it goes through iCloud. There is no Filmlog account and no Filmlog server holding your diary.
If Filmlog notices that its local database has been replaced, because you restored a different backup or set a device up from an old one, it stops and asks rather than deciding for you: restore from iCloud, push this device's copy everywhere, or merge.
Coming soon: Filmlog for Mac. What follows describes the Mac app as it will be released.
Filmlog on the Mac is a native application, not a stretched iPad build. It has a proper sidebar — Search, Inbox, Releases, Watchlist, Watched, Statistics — a Settings window with panes, menu commands, system typography, and details that open in the right-hand pane instead of as sheets. It is one window and it stays one window: a widget or a link opens in the window you already have.
Everything in the iPhone and iPad walkthrough applies here: each viewing is its own entry, appreciation is hearts or stars or points and never two at once, notes belong to a viewing, and the catalogue works with the network off. Multi-device support keeps this Mac in step with your other devices through iCloud.
Notes get an inline editor that saves as you type rather than a sheet you dismiss. Soundtracks play inside Filmlog instead of handing off to the Music app, through Apple Music as elsewhere: full tracks with a subscription, previews without one. Widgets sit on the desktop. Keyboard shortcuts run across navigation, lists and detail actions, with ⌘1 to ⌘6 following the sidebar's own order.
A standard Mac Settings window with four panes: General, Data, AI Assistants and Filmlog Plus. Import, export and backup live under Data, and behave as they do on iPhone and iPad.
On the Mac, Filmlog installs as a Claude Desktop extension. Once it is connected you can ask about your library the way you would ask a person: what you watched last winter, which Kurosawa films you still have not seen, how many times you have been to the Rex. It can also make changes — rate a film, mark a favourite, add something to the watchlist, follow a person, pin a cinema.
Two details matter. It searches both catalogues that ship with the app, so a question about a director is answered from the same 464,000-person data the app uses. And it answers in whichever appreciation system you have chosen: in hearts mode it will not mention ratings at all and will refuse to set one, in five-star mode it says "3.5/5", in ten-point mode it says "7/10". It does not translate between systems behind your back. This runs in Claude Desktop, alongside the app rather than inside it.
Setting it up, step by step, with questions to try: Filmlog for AI assistants on the Mac. It covers Claude Desktop and any other AI app that supports MCP servers.
Your library is indexed into system search here as well. On macOS 27, Siri and Apple Intelligence can answer questions about it, and unlike on iPhone and iPad this is available in the European Union.
Filmlog on Apple TV is deliberately a watchlist companion rather than the whole app. Its job is that the film you meant to see is on the screen you are about to watch on, instead of on a phone in your pocket.
Browse the watchlist on the television, open a film to see what it is, and mark it seen when you have watched it. That entry then appears in your diary on your other devices.
Where a film is available to watch, you can open it straight from Filmlog and pick the streaming service or store you want to watch it on.
Your challenges are here too, with their progress, and you can open one and mark films seen from inside it — which is exactly the moment you are most likely to want to, sitting in front of the film.
Search here is about what you have already decided to watch: it covers the films you have not seen yet, meaning your watchlist and the unwatched films in your challenges, and it finds challenges by name. It is not a search of the whole catalogue, which is a phone and desktop job.
The diary itself, statistics, import and the settings depth all stay on iPhone, iPad and Mac Coming soon. Multi-device support is what makes the television useful.
Does Filmlog track television series?
No. It is a film app. Television is not supported, and the app keeps focusing further on the cinema side of the experience.
Can it tell me what is playing near me tonight?
No. It finds cinemas near you and records which one you sat in. Screening data is not part of this release, but most cinema pages carry a link to the cinema's own website, so the programme and the screening times are one tap away.
Do I need Plus to get my data out?
No, and you never will. Export, backup and restore are free.
Do I need an Apple Music subscription for soundtracks?
Not to use them. Without one you get preview-length tracks and the web link to the album. Full playback and autoplay need a subscription, because the audio is Apple Music's.
Why does this film have no soundtrack?
Because no soundtrack album was released for it, or none that Apple Music carries. Filmlog shows the soundtrack where one exists and stays quiet where none does, rather than offering a button that opens onto nothing. It is not a regional limitation and not something that unlocks with Plus.
If I share a challenge, can the other person see how far I have got?
No. The link carries the list, not your progress. They get a copy of their own that starts at zero, with its own start date, and nothing connects the two afterwards. The same is true in reverse.
What happens to my ratings if I switch appreciation mode, or if Plus lapses?
Nothing is deleted. Hearts and ratings are stored independently and a mode only decides which is displayed. A lapsed Plus falls back to hearts, and your ratings are waiting when you come back.
Why did a shared link open the Inbox instead of the film?
That is intended. Shared links land in the Inbox on every platform so nothing is added to your library without you agreeing to it.