[lucozade]

There's probably a form of survivor ship bias going on here.

From the text he took a lot of photos. If he advertised in local newspapers, school/football club sites etc, he wouldn't need to find everyone. He'd just need find someone who could get a quorum of the people from a particular photo.

As such, it's probably more likely that he'd only find friends as he wouldn't need to find the group, just an individual. If, for example, he had found one of the girls but not a boy, chances are he wouldn't have taken the photo.