Re: IMG_0416
At last, I’m writing something in reaction to an article I had put aside for a long time now. It’s called “IMG_0416” and was published in November 2024. If I remember correctly, I stumbled on it via Hacker News.
In his article, Ben writes about a now long defunct feature of the earliest versions of iOS, called “Send to YouTube”, which allowed iPhone users to upload videos to YouTube, likely without realizing it. It was active between 2009 and 2012.
An interesting thing about this feature was the names given to the files of the videos recorded by the iPhone, which also turned out to be the title of the video once uploaded on YouTube.
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.
Ben invites us to give it a try:
Try searching for “IMG_XXXX” on YouTube, replacing “XXXX” with your favorite numbers (I used my birthday, 0416). See what you get!
So I did, I took a moment to dive deep into YouTube’s depths and replaced XXXX with numbers that would mean something to me.
I also used my birthday, 0904 plus my year of birth, 1981. I was specifically looking for:
- Videos with a very small number of views (the fewer the better)
- Old videos, from 2012 or earlier 1.
- Most importantly, simple videos that would give me a feeling of genuine authenticity, taken in the moment
Most of the videos, if not all of them, are not interesting at all. They are amateur videos, of poor quality, not really meant to be watched by more than a few close people. The people who recorded them might not remember or even know about them. Still, that banality brings something out. Humanity, authenticity, feelings, simple moments, simple glimpses of total strangers that probably forgot about those videos, even never knew they put them online.
It's hard to describe. I wouldn't spend hours looking for these kinds of videos, but sometimes, it feels nice to dive into that weird and almost uncanny part of the web.
Below are four of those IMG_XXXX videos. View counts reflect the numbers displayed when I found each video, at the time of writing this article.
IMG_0904.MOV (22 May 2012 – 25 views)
A blurry, unstable and too fast panoramic view of an ordinary fast-food restaurant car park.
The description says “Ayash Man Parking”. Ayash Man is the name of a restaurant located in Naugatuck, Connecticut. I found the place on Google Street view and it now seems to be closed, though. The restaurant is still visible on Google Street View in 2015.
Given the name of the person that uploaded the video, he was probably the owner of the restaurant, or a relative.
IMG_0904.MOV (12 April 2012 – 7 views)
A simple volleyball rally, with the pleasing joy of the winning team at the end of the video. Maybe recorded by a parent of a player, or a friend, who knows, who's apparently named Elisa. The description mentions “McGill”, it might be a team from the university of the same name, in Canada: Women's Volleyball - McGill University Athletics
IMG_1981.MOV (2 July 2010 – 21 views)
A guy, Doug, who shares a video from what I suppose to be his place “after sunset”, as written in the description.
It’s a boring video, but I can recognise myself in it. Indeed, I've been regularly taking small videos like that of the place I live in, just for the memories. I had a few decades-old videos (and some more recent ones) of the places I lived in and their surroundings. I enjoy, rarely I admit, looking at them and seeing how it was back then, sometimes comparing the places with how they are now.
IMG_1981.MOV (13 January 2012 – 27 views)
Justin started to play the flute a few months before that video, and I suppose he’s an avid supporter of Chelsea Football Club, as he’s performing the club’s anthem, Blue Is the Colour. I hope you rock the flute by now, Justin!
See also: IMG_0001, by Riley Walz, who “made a bot that crawled YouTube and found 5 million of these videos!”
Featured image by Robert Scoble. The image was retouched (by me) to add a relevant screenshot to the iPhone screen.
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Some of the results were ironically more recent than 2012… So I focused on videos from 2012 or earlier to maximize the chance of them coming from that iPhone feature. ↩