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.
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.
The feature worked… really well. In fact, YouTube reported a 1700% increase in total video uploads during the first half of 2009- crediting that growth to its strong integrative ties to Apple and social networks. However, this two-click upload feature was short-lived when Apple severed ties with YouTube by removing its homegrown app in 2012.
While Send to YouTube can be thoroughly analyzed as a milestone on the “frenemy” timeline between Apple and Google, I want to explore a pleasant consequence of this moment. Apple uses the ‘IMG_XXXX’ naming convention for all images and videos captured on iOS devices, where XXXX is a unique sequence number¹. 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.
Try searching for “IMG_XXXX” on YouTube, replacing “XXXX” with your favorite numbers (I used my birthday, 0416). See what you get!
There’s something surreal about these videos that engages you in a way you’ve never felt. 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. Putting all this together, searching IMG_XXXX offers the most authentic social feed ever seen on the Internet- in video, no less!
While many videos are redundant snippets of a concerts, basketball games, or kids’ recitals, you also get one-of-a-kind videos that provides a glimpse into a complete stranger’s life. You’ll see a tumultuous event that made them, their partner, or their friend say, “hey, let’s record this”. I’d like to show you three of these videos that I found in my search.
IMG_0416 (Mar 17, 2015) - 23 views
The video shows a woman excitedly unboxing a book she received in the mail. From context clues, she seems to be a wife and mother from Memphis who’s unboxing the first published copy of her book. She thanks the friends, family, and publishers who made this happen.
After a quick Google Search, I was able to find the book: A Profit / Prophet to Her Husband: Are you ready to be a wife? The book is meant “to help wives understand who they are and who they were designed to be.” It clocks in at 94 pages and has 30 ratings on Amazon! Go IMG_0416! I don’t care what you’re creating- I’m just a fan of creators. It looks like she kept at it- making a second book in 2020!
IMG_0416.MOV (June 24, 2015) - 26 views
The video appears to show a woman playing a matching card game that teaches you “the basics of the potash stuff” according to the cameraman. As the woman (who I assume is the cameraman’s supportive mother) flips two matching cards, she reads off the countries who produce the most potash.
I honestly didn’t know anything about potash! Turns out that it is a mineral with large amount of potassium, which is helpful as a plant fertilizer. With Canada producing the largest reserves in the world, the vast majority of Canadian potash is found in Saskatchewan. I wonder if this family lives in Canada. Or, if this is just another school project of useless facts… I miss those!
IMG_0416 (Feb 8, 2011) - 114 views
Let’s end on a fun one. The video shows a young man snorting powdered sugar and dealing with the consequences of it. Given his BU hoodie, Dunkin’ Donuts location, and ironic depiction of drug use, I gotta say this is a VERY Boston video.
What’s genuinely heartwarming is the shared laughter between the man, the camerawoman, and the motherly figure leaving Dunkin’. The camerawoman calls her “Myra”, suggesting they all know each other. We have nothing better to do, so we’re snorting powdered sugar captures an essence of suburban America that I’m sure many of us can relate to.
Edit: 11/3/24
IMG_0417 (Mar 14, 2014) - 16 views
I found this after posting, and it’s just too amazing to not include… a woman filming her partner as he finds out she’s pregnant.
Assuming all has gone well, the child is now almost 10 years old. I wonder if the family even knows this video still exists.
After posting this on Hackernews, it looks like somebody commented on the video lol. I hope the family receives a notification it and is able to share this with their kid.
¹ Edit: The IMG_XXXX sequence isn’t truly unique—after 10,000 photos, the numbering restarts at IMG_0001 (Source).
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Comments
I read this article when it was new and I've shared it with a bunch of people because it it unbelievably fascinating to me.
There's something borderline "voyeuristic" (for want of a better term) about it. There are all these videos that are public, I'm allowed to watch them, but they were clearly not meant for me to watch. It's like when you see a family photo at a Goodwill or something.
It's definitely worth trying out if you get bored; it's a proper time capsule. There's absolutely nothing cynical about it; these videos weren't made for profit, they weren't made to sell you something. They're candid videos of people as they were in ~2010.
There are also creepy videos. I just searched for IMG_ date of my birthday and there is a video of someone recording a dead pig. Nice way to start my day
By tombert 2026-03-1316:21 Sorry you saw that. I have tried a bunch of numbers and everything I saw was pretty innocuous, but I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that there’s gross or disturbing stuff.
By kypro 2026-03-1311:04 > There are all these videos that are public, I'm allowed to watch them, but they were clearly not meant for me to watch.
I disagree. I think most people probably intended them to be public and thought it would be cool if people watched – that was the attitude back then. In the early stages of web 2.0 people who were online would share everything and anything. Social media was public by default and no one really had a problem with it.
It was in the years that followed the launch of the iphone and the mass-adoption of the internet that various incidents caused companies and people to realise they needed to be more careful about what was shared publicly online.
I think the appeal of these videos is that they're authentic and highlight something we've lost today, not that they're "voyeuristic".
Most videos people watch on YouTube today have high production value, even most TikTok creators which show up on the "For You" page are professional content creators. Additionally, this was back in an era where people didn't really care about their public/online persona, and act as such.
It's not just a time capsule... It an alternative reality where people are not overly self-conscious about their image and where the internet is full of real people sharing real and rather mediocre things that are happening in their life, rather than curated moments to serve the advertisement interests of corporations. And it's an alternative reality which existed just 15-20 years ago. These people are not that dissimilar from us, but live in a completely different, far more authentic world.
Yeah that's weird, its like a time capsule seeing all the fashion. I just tried random numbers and it showed many videos that would only send to your family
By echelon 2026-03-1314:35 Should archive team get on this?
On the one hand, this absolutely is a time capsule. It's hard to get something this real and authentic. It is a legitimate snapshot of 2009 - 2012 and probably has no like anywhere else in the world.
On the other hand, do these folks even know? Would they be okay with it?
I suspect Google might close this if it gets enough eyeballs.
I think Archive Team should archive these. It's a fleeting glimpse at a disappearing world, where smartphones were brand new. We won't be able to recover it if it's lost.
It's worth noting that while these videos may have been unintentional, this was also an era when youtube was still inventing itself. Sure, there was real content creation, but the structures of sponsors and ad revenue that can be a real income today weren't there. Let's plays were just starting to dominate the platform, and people were still figuring out how to make money off of that.
As a result, there was a lot of this type of content: barely edited, poorly performed, honest moments of real life, amateurish creations of any kind, be that digital animation, music, acting, etc. I feel these IMG_xxxx videos reflect some of the vibe of the era. Now, sharing videos with people is easy enough in group chats, and youtube content feels so manufactured that people feel it's less appropriate to share this sort of thing via youtube.
By derefr 2026-03-1319:26 One might say that early Youtube was mainly thought of as a video pastebin that allowed (JS-assisted) hotlink-embedding into other pages. Youtube was to video as image-hosting sites like Imgur were to images. Which was important, in both cases, because not just video but even (HQ) images were hard to host yourself at the time, and also hard to send to other people without hosting them somewhere.
With both video and image-sharing sites, you didn't really expect the site itself to function as a social network that was worth "browsing." Rather, you expected the "front page view" to be an upload view; and from there, to take your uploaded assets and embed them onto a page to put them into proper context. And it's these webpages-that-contextualize-image/video-assets that you'd share links to, on forums and on early social bookmarking platforms (Fark, StumbleUpon, etc.)
By jrmg 2026-03-1313:14 Yeah, the _reason_ this was in the iPhone is that YouTube was a normal and reasonable (if unusual - because sharing videos online was unusual) way to share videos with friends and family. And people cared way less about privacy back then.
I love wondering if and how this kind of "Wild West frontier" in technology and communication and social interaction will ever come again:
Say we colonize Mars. Streaming anything from Earth takes hours (well 3-22 light minutes). Martians may invent their own planetary social network and share their own weird Martian memes for a while.
Or interstellar colony ships traveling for decades between the stars, and then practically cut off from Earth at whatever new exoplanet we land on.
There will definitely be lots of "golden eras of creativity" still to come, if we survive that long.
By unselect5917 2026-03-138:281 reply Mars' gravity is only 38% of Earth so I think quite a few would be crazy feats of strength or odd trajectories of objects. At least they would be if I were making them.
By unselect5917 2026-03-1313:15 I bet I could throw a football a quarter mile... ;)
By jl6 2026-03-1312:46 Any time someone carves out a new space online, the same sort of thing happens. Pioneers create infrastructure. Early adopters rush to explore the new medium. New possibilities or new constraints spur creativity. Then, usually one of two things happens: the new space was a brief fad, and it dies away; or the masses arrive and it undergoes an eternal September, standardization, commercialization, enshittification, drama… in other words, becomes integrated into the wider net. Those fed up leave and begin to carve out a new space…
Some initiatives (like the Gemini Protocol) remain (for now) in a tenuous niche where mass adoption seems impossible and yet they also don’t seem to be going away.
By popcornricecake 2026-03-1315:511 reply I recently stumbled upon a small channel called KVN AUST, who's been making videos about what he calls "YouTube's Recycle Bin". It's about this and SO many other search terms (over a hundred), that turn up videos that have been public for over a decade often without a single view. It's so fascinating to see the random things people have uploaded.
It's stupid that my YT front page is simply empty, because "Your watch history is off", when it could simply be filled with a random selection of videos.
By ggggffggggg 2026-03-1317:35 Stupid for us, but I bet people enable it just to get the empty page to go away.
