Click. On the screen, a small video of a river in a snowy forest. Click. Now, a camera moving non-stop recording from the back of a car. Click. A baby appears nibbling on a bun. They are videos that are usually terrible in quality and content.but they have something very curious in common.
Your name.
Between 2009 and 2012, Apple’s iPhones and iPod Touches included a feature called “Send to YouTube” that allowed users to upload videos directly to YouTube from the Photos app.
As an engineer named Ben Wallace explained on his blog, that was a real bombshell for the growth of YouTube, which thanks to that saw video uploads increase by 1,700% during the first half of 2009.
In 2012 that curious functionality was no longer available. Apple withdrew the YouTube application in August of that year, but despite this, the legacy of that option has been especially curious. And it is because All those videos were uploaded with a standard name: IMG_XXXX. That is, the letters “IMG_” followed by a number ranging from 0000 to 9999.
All that content that ended up on YouTube is still there. Millions of videos with those names—you can search “IMG_0001” on YouTube to check it—float on Google’s video platform. The vast majority of these are bland videos, poorly recorded and of very poor quality.
In many cases the visits to these videos are minimal – some do not have even one – but Wallace’s discovery has given rise to a most original project.
has created it Riley Walza developer who thought of offering a particularly nice way to “enjoy” those videos. Walz has created IMG_0001, a website in which it is possible to go from one video to another with a simple click of the mouse.
The videos, always in IMG_XXXX format, follow one another randomly. They allow us to contemplate small fragments of moments that people around the world captured and then uploaded to YouTube, probably with no particular intention of sharing or watching them later.
This is noticeable in these videos, which jump from topic to scene in a totally unexpected way. And in doing so, they show us (at least) two things. The first, the chaotic and apotheotic diversity of our lives.
The other, that the internet, once again, still wonderful.
In WorldOfSoftware | The Internet as we knew it is dying: generative AI is destroying it
