Random slices of other people's lives
A simple way of finding virtually unmatched videos on YouTube — and glimpses into other lives.
This is just fascinating:
Apple uses the ‘IMG_XXXX’ naming convention for all images and videos captured on iOS devices, where XXXX is a unique sequence number. The first image you take is named “IMG_0001”, the second is “IMG_0002” and so on. During the Send to YouTube era of 2009 and 2012, the title of one’s YouTube video was defaulted to this naming convention. Unwitting content creators would then upload their videos on a public site with a barely-searchable name. To this day, there are millions of these videos.
From here:
IMG_0416
Between 2009 and 2012, Apple iPhones and iPod Touches included a feature called “Send to YouTube” that allowed users to upload videos directly to YouTube from the Photos app.
Ben Wallace
And it works. I grabbed a random four digit number, plugged it in, and lost half an hour to these random glimpses of others lives. And now, it' going to do that to you. Here's a random selection of iPhone uploads from over a decade ago:
