Media Tracker Setup Checklist

Why start with a checklist?

A media tracker works best when it follows how you already watch, play, read, and listen. If you import every old title, make every category public, and rate things without a consistent scale, the library turns into noise before you get anything out of it. A short checklist heads that off. You decide which categories to start with, which records go in first, what your ratings mean, and how a public review differs from a private note to yourself.

OmniTrackr supports movies, TV shows, anime, video games, music, and books in one account, and there's no single right way to set it up. A completionist can start with every category. A casual user might begin with movies and games. If you mainly want to swap recommendations with friends, start with favorites, ratings, and a few finished public reviews. You don't have to fill in every field on day one. Aim for a library you can still read a month from now.

1. Choose your active categories

Start with the categories you'll keep up with this week. OmniTrackr handles all six media types, but keep your first session small enough to finish. Pick one primary category, one optional secondary category, and leave the rest for later unless you already have clean lists ready.

2. Define your rating scale before adding everything

Ratings only mean something if you give them the same way every time. Before adding a large collection, decide what a 5, 7, 8.5, and 10 mean to you. OmniTrackr supports decimal ratings, so you do not need to force a good-but-flawed title into the same score as a personal favorite. Write the scale down once, then use it while adding your first batch.

• 5.0: average or mixed, worth remembering but not something you'd push on anyone.
• 7.0: good, worth recommending to someone with the right taste.
• 8.5: excellent, memorable, and likely to survive a second look.
• 10.0: a personal all-time favorite. It may have flaws, but it means a lot to you.

After the first week, check your statistics and rating distribution. If everything is rated above 8, your library may be closer to a favorites list than a full history. That's fine if it's what you want, but it's good to know what the numbers are measuring.

3. Add a starter library first

Leave your full history for later. A starter library should be small enough to finish in one sitting and mixed enough to try out each part of the tracker. Add ten to twenty items across your active categories. Include a favorite, a disappointment, something currently in progress, something you plan to start, and one item you would recommend publicly. That gives ratings, status, search, and statistics enough to work with, and setup doesn't drag on.

1. Add the title, year or release date, and category-specific fields you know.
2. Let OmniTrackr fetch available poster or cover art when supported.
3. Check completion only for finished items. Use a note for paused or dropped, and a saved checkpoint for your current episode, page, or chapter.
4. Add a rating only when you can explain it later.
5. Write one or two sentences of private context before deciding whether a public review makes sense.

4. Keep private notes and public reviews apart

Leaving Public Review unchecked keeps an item's text off public review pages. Friends can still read it if the category is shared. Keep both controls private for personal item notes, or use your private journal or a checkpoint reminder.

Private notes can be messy. They can include spoilers, personal context, unfinished thoughts, or reminders that only make sense to you. Public reviews are for someone else. A public review should tell another person what you're recommending, who it suits, and why you gave the score you did. Public reviews in OmniTrackr are opt-in, and the public review feed favors longer review text, so the shared pages don't fill up with one-word reactions.

Use this rule of thumb: if the note only helps future you, keep it private. If it helps a stranger decide whether a movie, show, anime, game, album, or book fits their taste, tidy it up into a public review. Keeping that line keeps your private thoughts private and makes the public pages better to read.

5. Check privacy, friends, and exports

Before inviting friends or making reviews public, check your privacy settings. Decide which categories friends can see and whether statistics should be visible. Many users share finished favorites and keep in-progress experiments private. Friends can still find things to watch or read, and your account doesn't feel exposed.

Export is part of setup too. After your first real batch of entries, export your data as JSON so you know where the backup option is. You don't need to export every day, but a regular backup means you always have your own copy. It also makes later cleanup safer, since you can look through your data outside the app if you need to.

First-week cleanup checklist

• Search for duplicate titles or inconsistent years.
• Check whether ratings still match your written scale.
• Turn one private note into a public review if you want to share it.
• Hide or put off categories you aren't keeping up with.
• Review statistics to see whether your starter library reflects your actual taste.
• Export a backup once the library feels worth keeping.

For more help, compare workflows on the media tracking hub, use the tracking templates, browse the sample library, or read the review guidelines.