These days, the idea of filming a video on your phone and posting it to YouTube is banal. Forgettable. But back in 2009, it was a Star Trek-level push into the future. That year, Apple introduced “Send to YouTube,” a feature that would let iPhone and iPod Touch users post videos on YouTube with a single tap.
Send to YouTube didn’t have any of the capabilities we have in today’s YouTube Shorts editor. It didn’t let users pick a thumbnail or write a description. It didn’t even allow them to name the videos.
The result? There are millions upon millions of videos on YouTube with no titles—just automatic filenames like IMG_1701.
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We here at Tubefilter have been around these parts a while, and we’ve seen people discover this phenomenon over and over. Every couple of years, someone new realizes this trove of lo-fi, candid videos is out there, and goes on a hunt to find pre-recommendation algorithm relics where videos were posted raw, straight from people’s cameras, without any thought for production value or viewership optimization. (It’s like “Prisencolinensinainciusol,” a nonsense song from Italian singer Adriano Celentano that Hank Green and our own Josh Cohen pointed out seems to be “discovered” every two years on the dot.)
The latest folks to find this trove are Ben Wallace and Riley Walz. Wallace wrote a blog post about Send to YouTube Nov. 3, including four of his favorite unnamed clips. Then, inspired by his post, Walz made a bot that crawled YouTube looking for these videos–and found over 5 million of them.
From there, Walz created a website, IMG_0001, where people can watch all 5 million of these videos in random order.
He calls the project a “time capsule of raw, unedited moments from random lives.”
The videos are complemented with a little widget that tells viewers each clip’s upload date and view count. If viewers want to see a particular video on YouTube, they just have to click the widget, and it’ll take them to the channel where the clip was originally uploaded.
People have shown real enthusiasm for IMG_0001 over on Twitter, with some asking Walz to add more tools that allow things like filtering videos by year, and others recommending similar nostalgic projects they or their friends made (like PostSecret Voicemail, which takes people back to the landlines of yore by allowing them to leave anonymous voice messages and listen to others’).
Others say IMG_0001 is what social media “should” be—absent of recommendation algorithm and endless ads.
this is the perfect intersection of the type of thing that makes the internet special and worthwhile but also if I think too hard about I’m gonna have a depressive episode https://t.co/T0pL7gfcuG
— ⌍jason⌎ (@jasonsbmoc) November 19, 2024
Walz hasn’t said if he’ll do anything else with IMG_0001. But, even if he doesn’t, it exists—as a time capsule, as an archive, and as a companion to other projects that have remixed YouTube’s modern functionality into something from the past.
