Letterboxd Alternative: Build Your Own Private Movie Log

If you love tracking what you watch but want something simpler and more private than Letterboxd, you don’t have to hunt for the perfect app — you can build your own in a few minutes.

Why build your own instead of downloading one

Search “letterboxd alternative reddit” and you’ll find plenty of suggestions: apps with ratings, reviews, social feeds, follower counts. Some are genuinely good. But most share the same problem — they’re built for everyone, so they never quite fit you. Maybe you want a private movie diary app with no social features. Maybe you want Letterboxd for TV shows, which Letterboxd doesn’t really do. Maybe you just want to snap a photo and move on.

That’s the case for building instead of downloading. With Auto, you describe what you want, and it builds you a personal mini-app — a “Frame” — around your exact need. No feed, no strangers, no features you’ll never touch.

Build it in Auto

The core idea is a camera-first watch log: you point your phone at the screen, snap a photo of the title card, and Auto logs it.

To build your own:

1. Open Auto and describe the app you want — for example, “a private log where I snap a photo of a TV show or movie and it records that I watched it.”
2. Tell it how you want to rate things. A simple thumbs up / thumbs down is faster than stars if you just want a gut reaction.
3. Add anything specific to you — genre tags, a “rewatch” flag, notes, or a recommendations button.

That’s it. Because you’re describing your own situation, you end up with an app that matches how you actually watch, not a generic template.

How someone built theirs

One Auto user built exactly this — their Frame is called TV Watch Log — and their prompts show how quickly it came together.

They started plainly: build a TV watch log where snapping a picture of a show (usually the title card) logs it as watched. Their clever default — assume they enjoyed it, so a thumbs up is automatic, with a thumbs-down option for the misses. That small choice made logging almost effortless.

Next, they wanted their log to give something back. They asked Auto to add a tool that looks at the last 30 days of viewing and suggests one to three shows, triggered by a button in the app. Now their watch history quietly powers personal recommendations — no algorithm feeding on strangers’ data.

Finally, a polish request: add a thumbnail image for each entry, so the log looks like a real shelf of what they’ve seen.

Three prompts, one private, personal watch log. No code.

FAQ

Is this really private? Yes — the Frame you build is yours. There’s no social feed, no followers, and no public reviews unless you deliberately add sharing.

Can I log both movies and TV shows? Yes. Just describe both when you build it. The example above logs TV shows, but you can include films the same way.

Do I need to know how to code? No. You describe what you want in plain language, and Auto builds it. You can keep refining it with more prompts anytime.