Old iPhone Videos Hidden in Plain Sight ⇥ ben-mini.github.io

Ben Wallace:

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 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.

Like sharing Strava routes, this feels like a throwback to a different time. I found some videos shot on the fifth-generation iPod Nano, too, which used the same naming scheme.