I just migrated to LibreOffice from Microsoft Publisher and am in my late 70’s - so a big jump for me. But I do still work from home and need to master this. Please help with adding pages. My pages are written step-by-step instructions with photos. And, except for the cover page, I work in a 2-page spread format. I know if I keep typing Libre will add pages, but I don’t want to do that because I have photos on the page that will get out of wack. Please tell me how to add my own pages. I have the two page spread icon at the bottom of my writings but it won’t add simple blank pages without throwing off my photos. HELP! please.
LO is not equivalent to Publisher. LO Writer is “flow-oriented”, i.e. it splits text onto demand-allocated pages. This means there is no page “primary object”. You control page allocation only indirectly and in a non user-friendly way. In other words, you coerce the flow-oriented principle into an imperfect emulation of a page-oriented approach.
IMHO, you should look at Scribus which is a free DTP (desktop publishing) application which is “page-oriented”, i.e. you allocate pages which you fill with (chained) blocks containing your text.
Writer is very good at managing long text, like a novel, of which the final page count is unknown (at least from the start). Scribus is fit when the number of pages is defined a priori, like a catalogue or an ad flyer, and you “massage” text and illustrations to prevent overflow.
Scribus is probably the way to go.
If the photos don’t go across pages but are on, say, left hand pages with text on the right page then you could anchor the photo to the page. Effectively, this anchors the photo to that page number so text will flow past it.
Anchor to page was removed from the context (right click) menu but it is still available in properties.
You could have the text in a frame anchored to the opposite page. It is possible to link frames so that text will follow from one to the next frame but it can quickly get complex with more than a few pages.
As already mentioned by @ajlittoz and @EarnestAl, DTP software (Scribus & al) is probably the way forward for you.
I suspect that the icon you mention is where you can select alternate viewing layouts, beside the zoom slider. That tool is not what you need. It inserts nothing, and does not alter document content layout in any way. It merely changes how your document pages are laid out on screen as you are working.