Yesterday evening I set out to log all the movies I had watched since 2022. Sometime earlier this year I had added all such movies on an online service for this purpose, but it didn’t had dates, so I set out to log the dates for them as well.
Mainly, I was counting on my laptop activity data collected by ActivityWatch. I thought that maybe I had set it up a very long time ago. But it turned out, I had only set it up on 9 Oct 2024. So, for movies I had watched after that date, I was able to find out the watch dates from there (after a lot of trouble trying to get python running in wsl to connect with ActivityWatch running on main windows. What worked was to quit ActivityWatch and open it again at 0.0.0.0 so that WSL could also reach it). Then, for movies watched before that, my second source was my google browsing history exported from Google Takeout to an excel file. Now, I usually downloaded videos through Brave browser (meaning nothing in google history), but still it worked out for many movies, because in many cases, I used to google something about the video either before or after watching it, specially wikipedia page or related history if any (and sometime explainers) on my main chrome browser. Sadly, however, I had created that export in Apr 2025 and had found it having only data for past 12 months. So the last entry in my excel file is from 8 Apr, 2024. So, for movies watched before that, I had no data. But, I recalled another source. Now, I used to download movies and delete them after watching (because my laptop didn’t had much storage) but for movies that were good enough that I thought I would watch them again some time, I did not delete them. But in somewhere around june this year, I had bought an hdd with case to keep backup of my laptop data and also to offload unnecessary data from laptop. On that, I had also moved those movies. I was worried that when moving the files there, the file created date would have been changed to the date, I had moved it to the hdd because I had copied it through normal windows gui and not through commands that preserve original properties. But I thought to give it a chance, and I connected the hdd. Interestingly, the date created property had modified as I had thought, but the date modified property still showed the same date on which the file was created originally, or you can say the download date. I was able to verify it for the movies I had logged already. So, I got a bunch of more movies from there. I did that till yesternight.
It’s morning now, and just gotten on my laptop, and 37 out of 106 are still remaining to be logged, that are mostly those that I watched before Apr 2024. Now, a few might be actually after Apr, so I might be able to find data for them. As for the rest, I’ll have to extrapolate the dates, by thinking of the conditions and the place where I watched them and the time in which I was in that place. For instance, I remember a movie someone had recommended me when a certain event was happening at out university department. And I can find out the dates for that event, and from there I can get a close estimate of the dates. The idea is you can always get hard bounds for possibility of a certain event to occur, and then you further narrow the bounds as much as you can to get closer to the actual date. Well, let’s see what happens. I’ll add progress here.
So here’s the update. I was able to figure out a few more from the excel and then finally 30 were still remaining. So, I recalled that when I had created Google Takeout export, the history was not actually set to auto delete. So, I checked it again. And lo, the google search history before Apr 2024 still exists. Finding it out made me so happy. But irritating thing is I can’t export. Google Takeout only exports data of last 12 months, though technically it should export all data. So, after very tedious searching I was able to find dates for most of them. Around 10 were those for which I had to conjecture the date based on hard bounds and around which movies I had seen them. But I have a pretty close log now. Last year, I had done a similar dig to log dates of books read (though I had to use different methodology like linking books with reference and place bought and the place read and cues like that to find out the date I had read it).
Well, the final takeaway is that this movie era needs to end soon.