Picaflick
The plot twist your movie nights needed.
Everyone has a watchlist. Nobody compares them. We do. So you always know what everyone will agree to.
Pick a flick with a partner or your whole friend group.
Every poster tells a story
No spoilers though.
At a glance, see where to stream it, whether you've watched it, if friends have it on their list, and if there are content triggers you care about. No more opening five apps to see if you can watch a movie.
Shared watchlists, zero effort
Everyone has a watchlist. Nobody compares them. We do.
You and your friends already have watchlists. Why build a new one together? We find what's already in common. Just you and your partner or the whole group chat.
Swipe right on your next favorite
It's like dating apps, but the movies actually show up.
Personalized recommendations served one at a time. Swipe to add to your watchlist, skip, or mark as not interested. The more you swipe, the smarter it gets.
After reuniting with Gwen Stacy, Brooklyn's full-time, friendly neighborhood Spider-Man is catapulted across the...
Fresh off an almost career-ending accident, a stuntman has to track down a missing movie star and uncover a conspiracy...
Watch without worry
Because surprises belong in the plot, not in your anxiety.
Powered by DoesTheDogDie, get content and trigger warnings before you press play. Set your preferences once and posters flag movies with your triggers automatically.
Import from Letterboxd
Your watch history, ready on arrival.
Import your entire watch history and watchlist from Letterboxd and IMDb. Your ratings, reviews, and watchlist dates all come along for the ride. Hit the ground running.
Can't decide? Spin for it.
Let fate pick your Friday night.
Load up any watchlist and spin the wheel. Can't pick a movie? Let the wheel argue for you.
All unemployed, Ki-taek's family takes peculiar interest in the wealthy and glamorous Parks, as they scheme to become employed by them...
Your library, everyone's watchlist
Finally, a use for that 8TB hard drive.
Connect your Plex or Jellyfin library and invite friends. Your library shows up as a streaming service on their posters, and a request list gets built automatically from what everyone wants to watch that you don't already have.
Liam's Movies
Two screens, one watch history
Your checkmarks deserve frequent flyer miles.
Two-way sync with Plex or Jellyfin. Mark something watched on Picaflick and it shows up on your server. Watch something on Plex and it's already tracked here. Same for your watchlist and ratings.
Build on top of Picaflick
For when you want your watchlist to have a watchlist.
OpenAPI spec and webhooks so you can manage your account programmatically. Automate your watchlist, wire up notifications, or plug into whatever you're already using.
Roll credits on endless searching
Join the waitlist and be first to know when Picaflick launches.
huh?
Frequently asked questions
Where does the name "Picaflick" come from?
The obvious meaning is Picaflick means "pick a movie." But there's more going on:
- Pic as in picture, a movie.
- Pick as in pick a movie to watch.
- Flick as in a movie.
- Flick as in flicking through movies on the swipe page.
I am unreasonably proud of this quadruple entendre.
Why Picaflick over other apps?
I say this is the best movie discovery app in the world and I mean it. I made the app that my wife and I desperately wanted.
Browsing, rating, searching, and watchlisting movies is super polished with exceptional user experience. But the real difference is shared watchlists. If you and your friends use this app, you will always have a pool of movies to pull from in an automatically generated list. It's not AI. It just merges what's in common from your watchlists together. So simple, but such a big improvement to picking movies in a group, or just with your spouse.
Speaking of making this for myself, I am a nerd, so I made it compatible with nerds (it's ok if that's not you). But if it is, you can enjoy full Plex sync, a full API, webhooks, and a verified n8n community node. (Coming soon)
How was shared watchlists not done before?
It's a deceptively hard problem. When you and your friends all share watchlists with each other, the number of possible group combinations grows fast.
Imagine 50 friends who are all friends with each other. The number of possible groups that could have a shared watchlist is 250 − 1. That's roughly 1.1 quadrillion combinations. The Milky Way has an estimated 100 to 400 billion stars. Your friend group's watchlist possibilities outnumber the stars in our galaxy by about a thousand to one.
Ok, I know, I don't have 50 friends either. But the app will still work even if you're more popular than me. Even with 15 friends it's 32,767 combinations of lists. This took some creative engineering to not only make it work, but make it work instantly and all computed on device.
What can I do on the free plan?
Almost everything. You can track what you've watched, rate movies, get personalized recommendations, use the swipe discovery page, import from Letterboxd, set up content trigger warnings, and share two-way watchlists with unlimited friends.
What you need a paid account for:
- Shared watchlists with more than 2 people (though only one person in a shared watchlist needs the paid account)
- More than 2 streaming services on your profile
- Managing your libraries like Plex or physical media (though you can join others' on the free plan)
- Sync integrations
- API access and webhooks
How do shared watchlists work with the paid plan?
Everyone gets two-way shared watchlists for free. You and a friend can always see what movies you both want to watch.
A paid plan unlocks multi-person watchlists, and only one person in the group needs it.
Example: Alex has the paid plan and is friends with you, Sarah, Mike, and Jordan. All four of you are free users. Shared watchlists for every combination that includes Alex are automatically available: Alex + you, Alex + Sarah + Mike, Alex + everyone, and so on. You, Sarah, Mike, and Jordan won't see group watchlists on your own without a paid member in the mix, but any group that includes Alex just works.
I don't see any shared watchlists
Shared watchlists appear automatically as soon as you and a friend have movies in common on your watchlists. You don't need to create anything. Just swipe on movies you're interested in and nudge your friends to do the same.
Once there's overlap, the shared watchlist shows up on its own. The more you and your friends swipe, the more matches you'll get.
Where do the content trigger warnings come from?
Trigger warnings are powered by DoesTheDogDie, a community-driven database where people flag content like animal harm, jump scares, flashing lights, and dozens of other categories.
You set which triggers matter to you once, and every poster in the app will flag movies that match before you even tap on them.
DoesTheDogDie is a fantastic project run by good people. If you find the trigger warnings useful, consider making an account and supporting them.
How does library management work?
Connect your Plex or Jellyfin server and Picaflick will auto-sync your library. You can also manually track physical media libraries like Blu-rays.
Invite friends to be members of your library and it shows up as a streaming service on their poster overlays. Your Plex library looks just like Netflix or Hulu on every movie poster in the app, so your friends always know what's available on your server.
The app also automatically generates a request list from movies on your members' watchlists that you don't already have. No more "hey can you download this" messages. There's an API and webhook for the request list too, so you can wire it into whatever automation you want.
How does the search work?
When you search for something like "a man stuck reliving the same day," we don't just match keywords. We understand what you mean.
Every movie has multiple vector embeddings stored in Qdrant (a vector database): the title, the overview, the synopsis, and chunked plot points. Your query gets converted into the same kind of vector, and we find the movies closest in meaning.
On top of that, we run a traditional keyword search in parallel and merge the two result sets using Reciprocal Rank Fusion, a technique that combines rankings from different signals into one list without needing to tune arbitrary weights.
The system also adapts to what you're probably looking for: short queries like "Inception" weight title matches heavily, while longer descriptive queries shift weight toward plot synopsis vectors. It's hybrid retrieval that feels like it just works.