There are around 10,000 of them - personal images of New Zealanders during World War I.
They are photographs that show soldiers training, soldiers in battle and soldiers relaxing with their comrades.
And soon most of these images, housed in the National Army Museum in Waiouru, will be available for the public to view online thanks to a digitisation project currently under way at the museum.
Windsor Jones, curator of the Army Museum, estimates the museum holds about 250 albums - about 10,000 individual photos from World War I - as well as about 60 glass plate lantern slides.
While Archives New Zealand holds official World War I records, the museum holds more personal records of the war including photos, diaries and memorabilia.
"Some of these albums create a real picture of who the person was, and some of them have real research potential," Mr Jones said.
"It is an absolutely unique collection."
Mr Jones said the museum also holds some of New Zealand's official World War I photos.
"New Zealand was much slower than Australia was in documenting the war. New Zealand didn't have an official photographer until New Zealand troops got to the Western Front in 1916."
New Zealand's official World War I photographer was Henry Sanders, and his photos became known as the H Series. Mr Jones said any photo from World War I that was labelled with H plus a number was taken by Sanders.
"These photos are almost like stage shots, and they are mostly taken during training or before a battle. The personal photos are a lot less staged - although there are a lot of tourist shots too. I think every New Zealand soldier took a photo of the pyramids in Egypt."
Mr Jones said the museum had decided to take advantage of the centenary of the start of World War I this year to begin digitising its collection of World War I photos.
New Zealand Lotteries Grants Board gave the museum a $100,000 grant towards scanning the photos and putting them online.
Mr Jones said the scanning process was being done by a Wellington-based company, New Zealand Micrographics Services, which specialises in scanning heritage documents.
"We'll have a special website for the photos, and there will be a link to it from the museum's website. We hope it will go live in a few months' time."
A history graduate from Massey University, Brenton Beach, has been employed to work with cataloguing the photos. He has the job of researching and captioning as many of the photos as possible, most of which have simply been archived as "photos World War I".
"So far he's done about 100 albums, so he's getting through the work well," Mr Jones said.
As well as making the photos easily accessible for the public, there's also a preservation aspect to putting the photos online, Mr Jones said.
"It means the photos will be able to be handled a lot less, which keeps them in better condition."
The aim is to have as many photos as possible fully catalogued, scanned and digitised by April 2015, which is the centenary of the landing at Gallipoli.
Mr Jones said one of the most interesting things to have come out of the project is how many photos and albums there are of Gallipoli, despite the military's restrictions on personal photography.
"There were little box cameras, made by Kodak, that were easy for the troops to carry in their kit. Soldiers were allowed to have cameras but they were told to ditch them for security reasons, especially at Gallipoli.
"But it seems that many men did manage to bring their cameras home with them."
The other interesting thing to come from the collection was the portrait it paints of the Kiwi soldiers of World War I.
"There was obviously a lot of Kiwi ingenuity going on, with the soldiers making do with what they could. For example, their uniforms often deviated from what the textbooks say they wore.
"You might see a Kiwi soldier on the Western Front swapping cigarettes for a sheepskin coat, and using a rope to tie it closed."
Mr Jones said many of the photo albums were donated to the museum by the veterans themselves.
"They quietly give their photos to the museum, and the generations after them have no idea they even exist. We're planning for the website to be interactive, so people can post comments if they recognise someone in a photo."
The museum, which opened in 1978, has tens of thousands of photos from the 1880s to the present day. Some of the war photos are as recent as the New Zealand involvement in Afghanistan.
Mr Jones said some of the World War I photos had been in exhibitions but many others had never been seen by the public before.
"We're looking at doing an exhibition of some of the stronger images from this collection."
Some of the images that stick in Mr Jones' mind are the ones involving horses, including some in the current exhibition Harnessed: New Zealand's War Horses.
"There's a couple of photos of men shooting their own horses in the middle of the Egyptian desert. The soldiers became very attached to their horses - they fought with them, used them as shelter, virtually lived with them. But the New Zealand Government wouldn't pay for the horses to be shipped home and some of the men - rather than leave the horses to be ill-treated by the Egyptians - shot them.
"They're real tear-jerker images."
Mr Jones said he also liked the crowd shots, which he said were more "real" than the official war photos.
For more information about the National Army Museum, visit www.armymuseum.co.nz