In 2009, Apple introduced a “Send to YouTube” function for iPhones and iPod Touches (remember those?). With it, users could directly upload videos they had filmed to YouTube. No editing, title changes, fancy thumbnails, or any of the other prerequisites we now take for granted.
Instead, for three years, this feature was active, raw, unfiltered footage spread across YouTube with Apple’s generic naming convention: IMG_XXXX, with XXXX being a unique sequence of numbers.
Tech blogger Ben Wallace drew attention to this ocean of YouTube iPhone clips on a post written Nov. 3. In this post, he describes these videos as “the most authentic social feed ever seen on the Internet.”
What’s appealing about these YouTube iPhone clips?
“There’s something surreal about these videos that engages you in a way you’ve never felt,” he wrote. “None were edited, produced, or paraded for mass viewing. In fact, many were likely uploaded by accident or with a misunderstanding that complete strangers could see it. YouTube automatically removes harmful or violent content, so what remains exists in a unique, almost paradoxical state: forbidden, yet harmless.”
Furthermore, according to Wallace, these videos are far from niche. He claims that there are millions of these videos on YouTube, and that within 6 months of that feature being introduced to Apple devices, YouTube saw a 1700% rise in uploaded videos.
Moreover, inspired by Wallace’s blog, Riley Walz built a website to showcase this mostly-untapped side of YouTube called IMG_0001. As part of his work on the site, Walz made a bot to crawl YouTube to find all of these videos: there were 5 million. Now, thanks to this site, viewers can watch these videos in numerical order and uncover the “time capsule of raw, unedited moments from random lives.”
