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Explore a Time Capsule of Deep-Cut YouTube Videos

A new bot collects videos that were uploaded to YouTube directly from people’s iPhones, bringing viewers back to a time before Instagram.

ByKat Long|
The Apple iPhone 3G allowed users to shoot videos and upload them directly to YouTube. The 15-year-old videos still exist.
The Apple iPhone 3G allowed users to shoot videos and upload them directly to YouTube. The 15-year-old videos still exist. | Mario Tama/Getty Images

From 2009 to 2012, iPhones and iPods came with a feature that allowed users to upload videos from their Photos app directly to YouTube, which at the time was still in its infancy. It was a rare example of Big Tech partnership: YouTube wanted to increase its users, and Apple wanted to integrate itself into emerging social media networks. 

The move was successful, at least for a while. YouTube reported that uploads increased 1700 percent over the first half of 2009, spurred in part by the iPhone 3G’s direct-upload function, helping the site grow into the powerhouse it is today. 

The feature was removed from iPhones in 2012, but the videos remained like a time capsule of a world before Instagram. The tech and business blog Ben-Mini, in a post in November 2024, noticed many of these Apple videos were uploaded with default iOS file names, like IMG_0001, IMG_0002, and so forth.

That gave a coder named Riley Walz the idea to create a bot that could search YouTube’s nearly infinite library for these default file names and compile the 5 million available Apple videos into an online stream. The end result of this project, IMG_001, allows users to revisit a bygone era and see how people created “content” before the words content and content creator entered the vernacular.

IMG_001 is addictive, not in the least because many of the videos are just that—raw, unedited videos. Instead of the meticulously produced video essays or brain-hijacking clickbait you’ll find on YouTube today, the IMG_001 catalogue consists mostly of low-quality home videos, short skits, and other random recordings, many of them with next to no views.

They weren’t made to go viral, and that’s precisely what makes them so interesting. More than a snapshot of the late 2000s, they offer an intimate, unfiltered look into other people’s lives that you’re unlikely to find anywhere else on the modern internet.

IMG_001 isn’t Walz’s first coding project. Their website links to a variety of applications, including one that generates random biking, walking, and running routes; and Bop Spotter, a solar-power phone mounted at a street corner that runs Shazam 24/7 to identify pedestrians’ musical choices.

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