Private Robert Deegan was the first soldier named from a trove of thousands of photographs known as the Thuillier collection.

A husband and wife team took the images of soldiers at Vignacourt, a rest stop in France.

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The glass plates were found in a wooden chest in the family's farmhouse nearly a century later.

But none of the subjects could be identified until now.

Facial recognition technology has provided the key to finding these soldiers' identities.

Technology company NEC compared the photos to existing Australian War Memorial databases to find matches.

The first soldier identified was Bendigo's Private Deegan.

Lead researcher Sylvia Jastkowiak said the project helped bring the stories of the Vignacourt soldiers back to life.

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"Because a lot of the soldiers in Vignacourt weren't identified in the photographs, there are some pockets ... of particular soldiers' lives that aren't very well known," she said.

"It's just a completely new viewpoint on that history. These records have existed for 100 years, we just haven't been able to explore them.

"It would have taken years upon years for the war memorial to identify them at all."

Miss Jastkowiak said facial recognition had not been used on historical photos previously, but worked "brilliantly".

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