P: not allowing me to import duplicates, and this is getting extremely frustrating.

@Rikk One scenario I came across this week. Creating a slideshow for a family memorial service. They sent photos they wanted included. However when I tried to import them into LrD, directly into the shared album, some wouldn't import because I'd already received them on mobile some time ago. It took me ages to search for them one by one to manually add them to the album. Since Lightroom knew they were duplicates of existing photos, why couldn't it have been helpful and automatically added the existing originals to the album?

Hi Rikk, I understand it would, but I deleted the files from the card already, and weirdly enough only LR showed them still on after I deleted the files from the camera. I was guessing this is a database or whatever issue, and then a fresh format of the card in the camera fixed that as well, so now I'm not sure. If it happens again (I had it with my previous camera/card as well once, the current issue was on the new camera and fresh new card) I'll try to get you guys examples to hopefully help you improve your awesome app 🙂

Finding an example of two different files that are being labeled as duplicates would go a long way toward identifying and fixing the bug. That would eliminate the need for duplicate import. Can you provide a couple of example files where duplicate is detected but the images are obviously different?

@Rikk its not about needing duplicates but about not being able to correct LR when something goes bottoms up, like in my case where LR actually mislabels photos on the camera card as duplicates when the clearly are not. As im in a managed production enviroment its not a big issue, but i wouldnt like it when its images from a unique event. As a side note, the offending images were still showing as on the card in LR import, greyed out, even when the camera showed no images present after deleting everything in the folder. Formatting the card actually helped removing that error.

Our Product Management team is very interested in understanding workflows that require duplicates.  Lightroom Desktop offers the option to duplicate a file inside the interface. Additionally files can belong to any number of albums without duplication.  Can you elaborate on why a duplicate import is necessary?

Addendum: what helped me getting the files to be recognized as non duplicates was to duplicate them manually on the camera with an extended filename. The originals are still marked as previously imported but the copies on the card can now be imported properly.

My camera was accidently set to reset numbering. So I have photo's on my card with the same filenumber, but with a different time stamp then those stored in the cloud if all is correct, and the photo's are CLEARLY visually different photo's (different subject alltogether), yet LR insists that those new photo's were previously imported. So somethjing is amiss with the rules used to detect duplicates, the files are completely different except the file name, even the timestamp differs. LR refuses to let me import these 'fake' duplicates. LR causes a issue and it's clearly wrong in assuming what files are duplicates, and I can not manually correct and tell LR to import the files dispite it being wrong.

In addition to VIctoria's question, I wanted to add that a duplicate photo can be created by right clicking on any image.  The way Lightroom works you really don't need duplicates. We would really like to understand your reasons for this workflow though. 

Bear in mind that the cloud version of Lightroom has no concept of hard drives or folders, the photos are stored in the cloud and the same photo can be in multiple different albums without needing duplicate files.

Can you explain why you'd want duplicate photos in your cloud library? If your workflow is based on hard drives and folders, you might be better off with Lightroom Classic.

Adding an update. While I cannot add the images from, say, an SSD to LRCC Desktop, I was able to upload all of the images through https://lightroom.adobe.com/ and can now see them after restarting LRCC Desktop. This is less than ideal, as most of the time when I am on location I am not on wifi. What is going on?