Between 2009 and 2012, the iPhone and iPod touch introduced the “Submit to YouTube” button, which allowed users to easily publish videos directly to the site.
This feature worked so well that YouTube reported a 1700% increase in the number of videos uploaded during the first half of 2009. It all ended in 2012 when Apple removed YouTube from its apps and stopped the ability to download videos in a few clicks.
Ben Wallace, an engineer and vice president of customer success at Kibu, wrote about the defunct feature on his personal blog in November. He discovered something magical. “Apple uses a naming convention called ‘IMG_XXXX’ for all images and videos taken on iOS devices, where XXXX is a unique sequence number,” he said. “The first image you take is called ‘IMG_0001’, the second is ‘IMG_0002’, and so on. In the “Submit to YouTube” era from 2009 to 2012, the default YouTube video title followed this naming convention. Unknowingly, content creators uploaded their videos to a public site with a name that was difficult to find in a search. Today, there are millions of such videos.”
Wallace recommends searching YouTube for a specific number. “Try searching for ‘IMG_XXXX’ on YouTube, replacing ‘XXXX’ with your favorite numbers (I used my birthday, 0416). See what happens!”
But programmer Riley Waltz decided to take it a step further. Inspired by Wallace’s posts, Waltz created a bot that scanned YouTube and found 5 million “IMG_XXX” videos. He then created a website that randomly shows them to interested viewers.
As Wallace noted in his blog, there is something ghostly about these videos. The grammar for short-form video that Vine and TikTok have created does not yet exist. The accuracy is often low. Sometimes you shoot people in intimate moments. It’s like finding an old box of Polaroids in 2010. This is the raw material of people’s lives, what we thought we would have when we started building social media connections.
