iCollect Movies Pro review

We get our cinematic life in order as we review the film-organising iPhone app iCollect Movies Pro

Although no one would deny BluRay looks awesome, just as DVDs looked awesome after a decade or two of watching crinkled, grainy, washed-out VHS tapes, you really have to wonder if physical mediums are what the future of film viewing is all about.

We're all carrying pretty powerful computers in our pockets all day and all night now, with fast Internet connections that follow you around the world and grant access to online video stores whenever we want them.

Even TVs are heading in that direction, and with tiny, powerful media players happily pulling content straight from the web, or from epic-sized (and highly affordable) memory cards and hard drives, a box and a disk seem very last century.

If there's a downside to storing a year's worth of continuous movie-viewing on a 50-quid hard drive, it's that you can easily forget what you've actually got. It eliminates the shelves full, or teetering stacks, of boxes, and the flashy covers that come with them. Fortunately, the same device that can carry those films with you can also help you to keep them organised with apps like iCollect Movies Pro.

As it suggests, this is a cataloguing application for keeping track of the films in your collection. It's features a neat and simple interface that takes the work out of entering the list and automatically populates all the info you could possibly think of.

Add a new film, confirm you're talking about the same one the app thinks you mean, and it pulls in the cover, synopsis and cast and crew info straight from the net. But this is a two-way system, so if you feel there's more information required or want to correct existing data, the option is there to do so. And that info is sent back to the net, so everyone gets the benefit.

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Should you find a film that's not in the encyclopaedic database, you can even take a photo (assuming you have the box) and add it in manually.

Once compiled, your list can be sorted in most every way you could ever want: By title, year, type, genre or - if you keep it updated - even by last or least watched. So if you're looking for a film you haven't seen for ages or potentially haven't watched at all, iCollect Movies Pro will offer those up as a viewing suggestion.

Shaking the device furthers this suggestion system by giving you a random film from your personal database, which can be useful if you're stuck for ideas what to do with your evening or, perhaps more likely, can't agree with the other couch potatoes.

IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes are scraped for reviews and info, should you still be struggling to make an informed decision, and you can sync all your data and viewing habits across multiple devices or with an online iCollectMedia.com account.

The number of options included in iCollect Movies Pro almost seems ludicrous for a bit of a cataloguing app, but that's certainly no reason for complaint. You're not obliged to take you film collecting to OCD levels and can just use the basic app functions, but if you are of that obsessive mind, iCollect Movies Pro will deliver the virtual repetitive hand washing you desire - and then some.

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