Import to Photos app/MacOs is disabled/greyed-out even though the iPhone is connected

My iphone (stephenb) is successfully connected to the Macbook pro.

I have imported into Photos.app from this phone a couple of dozen times already. There are a few new photos that I want to import but the buttons are grayed out:

The Photos app has been restarted and the iPhone as well - but the buttons are still grayed out. Any thoughts?

Solution 1:

It seems that my iPhone were full in some way: after removing gobs of photos and videos it is working to sync. I did not see/notice any indicator of the memory being full and the Settings|General|Storage had said 8.7GB out of 16GB before deleting anything (now says 6.6 out of 16GB). That is strange behavior.