Found my images

I wonder if you could try to explain something for me.. During the past several weeks I have been looking for a shoot that I did in 2018. I was unable to find it in my Lightroom catalogs or by any of the numerous means of trying to locate missing images. It was not until I had to do some work in Photoshop that I located the entire shoot which appeared in the HOME screen of Photoshop CC. Naturally I was pleased to find these images. But I knew that they could only be pointers to where the images reside in my hard drive. The file numbers were still missing in my HD. So I decided to see whether I could upload one of those images on the Home screen of Photoshop and found that I actually could upload it and make any changes I wanted. So after everything else had failed I set out to upload individual selects from that group of images in Photoshop and place them in my pictures file. So far so good. But here is the question...I imported those images into Lightroom and dragged them to a new collection.Also fine so far. But when I looked at my entire catalog all those images had blank previews and the "missing file" labels. What is happening here? Why can't Lightroom find those images and at the same time see them perfectly in a collection? Any ideas?

Thanks for your response. I think I knew that these images were just a series of pointers. But can you explain why I was able to make a few perfectly fine prints from a few of them? As I said, I have no idea why these pointers should have found a home in Photoshop. Can you try to explain? Also, I have been unable to locate these files in my hard drive. Do you have any suggestions, other than the obvious, way to possibly find them? Thanks