Import photos rejection

Hi there,

I am trying to import hundreds of images into Photos on a Mac Mini so that I can re-export them again, minus their date and location data. This is straightforward to do in the first instance by unchecking the relevant boxes during export. However, I am using drone files where the file numbers repeat and different batches of images from a field survey can look very similar.

When I came to import the second batch the import function only acknowledged 83 new images for import and ignored the other 585, presumably because it recognized all of those from a previous import, during experimentation, and so it doesn't want to allow in duplicates. I have deleted all those imported images but that doesn't appear to make a difference.

To try and get around this I changed the names of all 868 files and tried again but it did the same, so it clearly it doesn't use the file name alone to indicate if it has already imported the files.

I guess what might be useful is if I can switch off the 'reject duplicate' option (if there is one) and so override the 'rejection' of the majority of the images. So far I have not found an option to do that.

Any ideas?

Thank you