Open images in Lightroom from other application

Question

Using a picture browser or other image management application, after selecting one or more raw files (maybe from different folders), what is the syntax for a call to Lightroom to open those files (best directly in the develop module)?
Right now I can ask to open the images in Photoshop/ACR or to open a folder on Bridge, but I can't find out how to do that with LR. I just can't bypass the catalog part which is useless to me.

Answer 1

LensView wrote:
Both questions are not specific to my own workflow problem, but are rather normal functionalities for an image management tool, which LR wants to be.
I might disagree a little here, depending on your definition of "normal".
IMO Lightroom is a SOLUTION to some of the more awkward, repetitive and limiting aspects of the normal - or let's say, usual - principle by which conventional software works.
That is: to open FILES from the file system, change their contents, and then save updated versions back to the file system, replacing the prior versions. With this concept, the file is the working data; and the working data is fully represented in the file.
Now this kind of method can be extremely powerful, and is completely familiar to anyone who has used any kind of standard computer program. So familiar, that it can seem like the only possible way that work can sensibly be done. But this is NOT what Lightroom "wants to be".
Lightroom does in fact "want" the user to achieve everything normally required: starting with a picture in the camera, ending with a print / JPG uploaded to a web gallery / whatever, via an interactive editing and management environment. And that is precisely what it delivers - it just does not do so by conventional file-based means.
Well, technically it's more accurate to say it does - but the working data file concerned, which is Opened from disk at the beginning of your session, changed, and written back to disk as updated data, is... the Catalog.
In LR you are in effect dealing with "pictures" rather than files per se. A "picture" consists of the dynamic combination of an original file on disk, together with some live information derived from the Catalog database.
So you can manipulate a whole library of such pictures not only at speeds not otherwise possible (if you were attempting to open and save those individual image files conventionally); but also, in organisational ways that ignore the limitations of a file-based approach. These include involving a given original image file on disk, in multiple processing variations, and multiple mutually exclusive groupings, on-the-fly without requiring any physical change or duplication of the file involved. It is all far more fluid and open-ended, because the whole undertaking  is virtualised via the Catalog database, and a whole workflow specifically designed around that.