I lost some photos in Lightroom

[FredT]

I don't know what I've done and it has me totally baffled.  A couple of weeks ago I imported a small set of photos, all in a folder by themselves.  I did some editing on them and exported a few to put on my iPad.  Today I wanted to go back to one of the photos, but the folder it, and the others, was in was no longer listed under the Folders panel.  So then I searched for the file by name, but it was not to be found.  I've done a lot of rearranging recently, so I figured that I must have messed up and accidentally removed the folder.  Since the original folder was still intact, I to just just import it again.  But Lightroom won't do that, saying that the photos are "suspected duplicates".  I ran "Find Missing Photos", but that didn't find any of these.  So, a) how do I find where Lightroom is hiding these photos in the catalog, or b) how do I get Lightroom to forget about them so that I can reimport them?

[Hans Kruse]

Import them again without the option of detecting dupplicates. The when you have imported them look at the newly imported images and select on of them and click on all photograhs in the left hand side. Then be sure you have sorting as capture time and look which photos are next to the one you selected. You then should be able to see the dupplicates and see of there is a ? on any of them and if not then right click and select show in finder/explorer depending on platform. Since you have edited the previous ones it should be easy to see which ones are the old ones and then you can find them.

Alternatively, if you know the date then first select all photographs and then click on metadata in the top search panel in Library view and choose date as the primary search criteria and then go down and select the date.

[FredT]

Import them again without the option of detecting duplicates.

How do I do that?  When I select the folder of photos to import, all of the photos are grayed out. Hovering over the thumbnails shows some information about when the file was created and the statement "This appears to be a duplicate of another photo in the catalog."  I can't find any option to import them again.

[kevk]

In the import dialog there is a checkbox "Don't Import Suspected Duplicates" - see attached screenshot.

Kevin

[FredT]

In the import dialog there is a checkbox "Don't Import Suspected Duplicates" - see attached screenshot.

Kevin

Thanks Kevin.  I'm embarrassed to say that I've never opened the File Handling panel before!

So, files imported, there's no hint of duplicates anywhere, so I guess the mystery of where th original set went will have to remain just that, a mystery.