Can you suggest a workflow for me?

Question

While I love the file organization and keywording functions of Lightroom, I want to use only Adobe Camera Raw and Photoshop for processing.  I'm struggling with how to develop a workflow that would include Lightroom, but only for organization purposes.
It seems that every Lightroom workflow tutorial, article or video always insists on making use of the "Develop" module, which I do not want to use.  Can you suggest a workflow for me?  For instance, which first thing would be best....import my Raw files to a file on my hard drive or import my Raw files into Lightroom.  I would prefer working out of Lightroom for post-processing, as I mentioned, but I want to be able to update my Lightroom catalogue with my changes.  Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.  Thank you!
Dave

Answer 1

What is your workflow, now, with Bridge/ACR/Photoshop?  What value-added does Lightroom bring to the Bridge/PS/ACR workflow you currently have, and what do you feel LR doesn’t do well that causes you to want to use Bridge/ACR, instead?
The XMP file will save the Develop settings between LR and ACR.  ACR will read settings from the XMP files (as long as you have the preference set not to store the settings in a central camera-raw database) whenever you are in Bridge or ACR and ACR will write to the XMP files whenever you click Done to exit, or choose Update XMP or whatever the menu items says.
LR can be told to Synchronize metadata settings, or you can explicitly read and write to the XMP files.  LR also reads from the XMP files when you import, and writes to them in the background if you have Automatically write XMP files (or whetaver the phrase is) enabled in Preferences.
If you want to live I both worlds then you need to think about what you’re doing with what XMP files, when, so you don’t overwrite something you work on in the other program.  As others have suggested, this is harder than if you just used LR or Bridge/ACR for everything.