Website "IMG_0001" Revives Lost YouTube Videos from Early iPhones

This website digs up YouTube’s lost iPhone videos. It’s called “IMG_0001.” With it, you can browse random video clips uploaded over a decade ago.

The site has a fun design. It looks like an old TV with static, and there's a retro Panasonic remote you can click to start watching those old YouTube videos. Most of these clips come from devices like the iPhone 4 from 2010.

Riley Walz, a tech guy who once staged a fake steakhouse in Manhattan, created this site. He got the idea from a blog by Ben Wallace. Riley believes the iPhone made this project possible.

Between 2009 and 2012, iPhones had a “Send to YouTube” feature. This allowed users to upload videos directly from their phones for everyone to see. Often, these uploads didn’t come with any descriptions.

Each video is titled something like IMG_XXXX. That follows the default naming style used by iPhones and many other cameras.

As you browse, you might see a video of a white cat jumping at the camera or a concertgoer at a Wu-Tang Clan show. Maybe you'll even find friends diving into a pool. The site shows you the upload date and how many views each video has. Most of the time, the view counts are under ten. If you click on the view numbers, you’ll go to the original YouTube page for that video. You can comment or just enjoy how YouTube captures these moments.

If this sounds familiar, you might be thinking of a similar project called Astronaut. It launched in 2017 and had a similar idea to IMG_0001. However, Astronaut focused on newer videos with low view counts and only showed short clips unless you took action.