Since its official foundation in 1948, the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage (KIK-IRPA) has been responsible for documenting Belgium’s artistic heritage of photography. In the meantime, the collection has grown to more than a million images. At the end of 2013, the digitization unit was launched to ensure the conservation, the digitization and the longterm preservation of this collection The digitization project of German photos taken during the First World War is one of the major achievements of this new team. At KIK-IRPA, digitizing is a lot more than pressing a scanner button. Glass plates negatives are first subjected to a conservation treatment. Then they are digitized using a light table and a digital camera. Image processing software is then required to obtain the best possible result. Exchanges between the digitization unit and researchers of the 14-18 Project have led to a better understanding of how the Germans worked. The digitization of the negatives and their photographic grain has led to new information, in particularly on the equipment used. The information printed along the edges of the negatives has also provided new information on the subjects, the dates and the locations of some of the shots.