For far too many years I’ve used Trakt and Letterboxd to track everything from movies I’ve watched to rating them, keeping a watchlist and too often skimming through them only to discover I was about to queue up a movie I’d already seen. It worked, but since I migrated most of my services to a self-hosted stack, I’ve been looking for a tool that can replace this online tracking as well.
While finding a self-hosted alternative was certainly a priority for me, the bigger problem was that my media life was rarely limited to movies. I also monitor TV shows, anime, manga, games and books. This means switching between multiple apps, multiple accounts, and multiple systems that never communicate with each other. My watching history was on one of these apps, my reading history was in Goodreads, and my current media server had no connection to any of them. This is what finally pushed me to install Yamtrack on my NAS.
This open source tool solves a simple problem: keeping all my media tracking in one place. The tool is a self-hosted tracker designed to track the entire gamut of media, from movies to TV shows, anime, manga, games, books, comics, and even board games. And it works through Docker, which means deployment is a breeze. Here’s everything you need to know about it.
This free, self-hosted app turned my Jellyfin server into a YouTube archive overnight.
It would be more appropriate to say that my Jellyfin library exploded
Season tracking, reviews, personalized entries and one place for everything you consume
In addition to all the other reasons I mentioned earlier, the main reason I was moving away from Letterboxd was that the tool is great at being Letterboxd, that is, a film-focused platform. Switching between apps for all your disparate media types is no fun at all. Yamtrack has solved this problem by treating all of your media tracking as one connected habit rather than separate hobbies.
Since switching from Letterboxd, I initially started using it for films, but what held me back was everything else. TV shows can be followed season by season and even episode progression is supported. It matters more than people think. If you’re an avid recorder of your media consumption, you’ll understand what I mean. Far too many apps reduce shows to a single entry, but a multi-season show isn’t an all-or-nothing affair. This effectively means that a mid-season break or gap between seasons cannot be tracked effectively. Yamtrack does it one better by letting you track TV shows by season and episode. It’s great.
Elsewhere, if you want to get specific results, you can even assign scores to everything you’ve watched. This allows you to assign ratings and easily return to your favorites. Likewise, unlike most other tools that only give you clear information about monitoring status, Yamtrack goes a step ahead by allowing you to mark something you’ve consumed as paused or abandoned in case you lose interest. Of course, you can add start and end dates and leave notes too. What surprised me was the robust support for reviewing media, something most other services ignore. I keep coming back to some of my all-time favorites like Lost and Yamtrack can also keep track of revisions and replays. You get a full history tab to see how you interacted with media at any given time.
Another feature I like is the custom input tool. Not everything I look at is available in public databases. Especially when it comes to arthouse cinema, rarely well represented in standard cinema databases. Yamtrack allows me to create manual entries for these instead of forcing my library to remain incomplete.
Auto Tracking, Best Property
Self-hosting your entire entertainment history makes much more sense than relying on public platforms
The other, but equally important, reason I changed is control. With public platforms, all your data, tracking, and monitoring history are on someone else’s servers. Your history, ratings, lists, and years of following depend on someone else’s decision about how your platform works. If features change or disappear, or your data is leaked, there’s not much you can do. This is obviously not true for self-hosting.
Yamtrack runs via Docker on my NAS and all data is here under my control. Yes, that means backup is my responsibility, as is ensuring uptime, but that’s a small tradeoff compared to the freedom I get in return. Since Yamtrack supports CSV imports, you can import all your data from existing services like Trakt, MyAnimeList and more. Plus, it integrates with Plex webhooks, Jellyfin, and other streaming apps. This means that every time I actively look at something, it automatically updates in Yamtrack without requiring any manual input. This is great in my opinion. You’ll also find other quality-of-life additions, like a series calendar that shows you what’s next.
Why Letterboxd and Trakt are no longer enough for my configuration
Tools like Letterboxd and Trakt work great for what they are, but they don’t provide a more prosumer workflow. Once your media consumption habits spread across movies, TV shows, books, games, etc., you need an all-inclusive setup, and commercial services can’t really fill that gap. However, this self-hosted service absolutely does it, which is why Yamtrack has quickly become an essential part of my self-hosted stack.
Yamtrack: This self-hosted media tracker helps you manage movies, TV shows, anime, books, games and more in one place.