Lightroom won't import my photos because it thinks they are already there

You need to bring up the LR Filter bar.

Then go to the Text section.

Select File Name in the left most field

Select Contains in the center field

Type in the Complete File Name of one of those images.

When that photo is displayed right Click on it and select "Go to Folder in Library". You will then find those images are already imported into the LR catalog.

What more than likely happened is when you did import them you had Copy selected and the images got moved from the folder you original placed them in to some other folder.

So when you tried to import them again LR stop you from doing that as the LR Catalog file already has a record of them.

Type in one of those file names

Now, perhaps the missing images would tell me this.

Catalina, and a particular folder. Is that folder the OS folder, Photos?

Clearly either an issue on this community site is occuring, or my browser is doing something odd. Attachments will not come up, clicking on attachments just brings up the posting again.

Yep, got off my rer, turned on PC, same issue with attachments.

Could you paste your image in instead of attaching.

First you need to figure out why Lightroom thinks this. Often, the reason it thinks this is because you actually have imported the photos and you have accidentally told Lightroom to do a COPY instead of an ADD. So Lightroom thinks the photo is in a different folder than you think it is in.

So, you need to find these photos in Lightroom. Follow all of these four steps in order:

1. In the Lightroom Library Module, on the left, under Catalog, click on All Photographs
2. Turn off all filters (Ctrl-L once or twice)
3. Turn off all stacking (Photo->Stacking->Expand All Stacks)
4. Search for at least one of these photos by file name using the Lightroom Filter Bar

Does Lightroom find a this photo in some other folder than the one you thought it was in?