Boing Boing

Boing Boing

Time capsule of 5 million random iPhone videos reveals life before Instagram

Mark Frauenfelder
Nov 29, 2024
∙ Paid

YouTube

Between 2009 and 2012, iPhones had a feature that allowed users to directly upload videos to YouTube from their Photos app. Many users uploaded videos without changing the default filename format (IMG_XXXX) that iPhones assigned to photos and videos.

Riley Walz created a bot that found 5 million of these IMG_XXXX videos on YouTube, uncovering a co…

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