Allow importing unsupported file types so all assets from a shoot stay together

To me, this seems to stretch the LR paradigm too far. 

Bridge’s points of unique advantage arise specifically from being tightly tied to files and folders: from presenting a live picture of the file system. This proposal falls into that camp, in my opinion. 

Lightroom’s (whether local Catalog or cloud based) points of unique advantage arise specifically from NOT being so tied. From presenting something deliberately other than the file system.

So we have (say) achieved some selection of images within the Catalog - a Collection, or Smart Collection, or we’ve done a search based on image attributes - perhaps disregarding folder location altogether. And now we become curious about some shoot related but Lr-unsupported files that also exist alongside one of those imported images. These files didn’t meet the criteria of our image search so we’d always have to navigate elsewhere to view those.

We could go to that image and choose “Go to Folder in Library” and see what else is imported from there. For these unsupported files to be visible they would need to become in some way importable, and then we may need a way to stop them from showing up where unwanted. Complications.

OR, and we can already do this, we can instead choose “Show in Explorer” (or Finder) for an image of interest. This takes us to its shoot folder where these other non-Lr-supported files WILL be visible, and openable by the system default app for each filetype, with a double click.

But our Catalog’s specialist remit, as an image library system, will have been kept clean and lean.

There is a plugin that can do this. Check out ‘AnyFile’ from John R. Ellis.