Existing images on server – link to Media Library

Good day,

I have my images on my server in the wp-content/uploads/2014/08 directory. I simply want to be able to tell the media library about them.

I have searched the categories here and while there is a lot of discussion around this – none seems to address my specific problem.

They were originally uploaded via the Media Library and thus have their child images created, meta titles/alt/and descriptions entered at the time also.

I performed a WPAllimport import of my products and now the Media Library has ‘forgotten’ these images.

I have my featured images sorted out as WPallimport has a nifty feature to perform this task – it is the ‘product gallery’ images that have been forgotten.

Is there a way to say to the media library to ‘look here [URL]’ at ‘these images [image files names]’?

I’m happy to re-assign the ‘product gallery’ photos once they in the Media Library (unless someone knows of an import plug-in that can help with this)

However, I am not happy to have to delete all the product gallery images from the uploads folder on the server (so I don’t get duplicates) – re-upload these images to the media library (& have the child images re-generated) and then have to add the meta titles/alt/description fields again.

Can someone help me save unnecessary server traffic (and time) and help solve this problem for me?

Kind regards,
Andrew