WP API will ignore filter values it doesn’t understand, so the following are essentially identical:
curl -gv "myamazingsite.co.uk/wp-json/wp/v2/media/?filter[id]=123"
curl -gv "myamazingsite.co.uk/wp-json/wp/v2/media/"
Any filter keys that are valid, however, will be used to filter the results, so if there are no images for the year 2015, the following will return nothing ([]).
curl -gv "myamazingsite.co.uk/wp-json/wp/v2/media/?filter[year]=2015"
I’m not quite sure what you want your first curl command to return, if you could clarify, I’d be happy to expand this answer.