Sailor Victor Magnus captured the scene when a ship carrying explosives caught fire in Halifax, Canada, resulting in the deaths of 2,000 people.
The explosion, on Thursday 6 December 1917, almost wiped out the town.
Mr Magnus's daughter, Anne Foreman from Cornwall, is to take the pictures to the Imperial War Museum in London.
It was 09:04 (GMT) when Halifax suffered the world's greatest man-made explosion at the time, when the two ships involved in the war effort collided.
Standing on the shoreline was Royal Navy Lt Victor Magnus.
The French ship SS Mont Blanc, which was loaded with wartime explosives, collided with the Norwegian vessel SS Imo.
The cataclysmic explosion occurred after a fire broke out on SS Mont Blanc, all of which was caught on camera by Mr Magnus.
SS Mont Blanc was described as a huge 'floating bomb' because of her formidable cargo.
There were more than 2,000 tonnes of picric acid, 200 tonnes of TNT, 56 tonnes of gun cotton and 223 tonnes of motor fuel on board.
Records show the ship exploded and disintegrated in seconds.
Altogether 3.8 sq km (1.5 sq miles) of Halifax was flattened and more than 1,900 people perished.
Avid photographer Mr Magnus managed to capture plumes of smoke and a town littered with ash in his photographs.
After the war Mr Magnus had three children. His daughter, Anne Foreman from Hayle, Cornwall, decided to share her father's photographs during the anniversary of the outbreak of World War One.
She said: "This has brought him to life again. It's amazing, it brings tears to my eyes.
Ms Foreman, aged 89, said her father was on watch during the morning of the explosion when he took the pictures.
"The blast absolutely blew Halifax town into oblivion, the whole of the harbour and the town was devastated.
"The thing that struck me most was a cannon that was blown three miles in land.
Ms Foreman said her father was "a kind and lovely man with a great sense of humour".
"There are so many things I've found out about him and his experiences from these photographs. I'm so happy he's been brought back to the forefront of our minds," she said.

It follows changes to the policy two years ago which regulators felt breached European rules.
Among other things, it says Google must tell users exactly what data is collected and with whom it is shared.
Google said it was working with regulators to "explain its privacy policy changes".
The dispute has been running since March 2012 when Google consolidated its 60 privacy policies into one and started combining data from YouTube, Gmail and Google Maps.
Users were given no means to opt out of the changes.
Although Google has not been directly accused of acting illegally, it has been accused of providing "incomplete and approximate" details raising "deep concerns about  data protection and the respect of the European law".
Google did make some changes to its privacy policy in March this year, linking to individual services from its main privacy document.
"It has made some changes but our investigation won't end until we believe it is fully compliant," said a spokesman for the UK's information commissioner's office (ICO).
In a letter addressed to Google's chief executive Larry Page, the European Union's data protection working party wrote: "Google must meet its obligations with respect to the European and national data protection legal frameworks and has to determine the means to achieve these legal requirements."
A spokesman for Google told the Reuters news agency that it was looking forward to discussing the new guidelines.
"We have worked with different data protection authorities across Europe to explain our privacy policies," he said.
Regulators in Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Britain and the Netherlands have launched investigations into Google's privacy policies and, in January, France fined Google 150,000 euros (Â£117,000) for failure to comply with its privacy rules.
"It is disappointing that two years of deliberation has led to the preparation of a document that is the equivalent of selling cucumbers to the gardener," said Anna Fielder, chairwoman of trustees at campaign group Privacy International.
"The guidelines are fundamental basics that Google should have implemented years ago, and the weakness of the language used in framing this will mean Google will do nothing to comply.
"These guidelines are doing nothing more than stating the obvious, and it is shameful that it took the Article 29 Working Party two years to come up with something that Google should already have been complying with," she said.
Unseen pictures from World War One have been released showing what was then the world's largest explosion.
[NEXT_CONCEPT]
European data privacy regulators have put renewed pressure on Google to alter its privacy policy.