How to use photoshop actions in Lightroom classic

The reason the images have to be exported before the Photoshop droplet will run is that Lightroom Classic doesn’t have exactly the same feature set as Photoshop.

For example, if you have a Photoshop action that applies a Blur filter and the Canvas Size command, that action is impossible to run in Lightroom Classic because Lightroom Classic doesn’t have either of those features. The action can’t do them because the features are not there.

If the reason you want to run them from Lightroom Classic is because they need to be applied as a batch, then ExUSA’s suggestion is a good one because you can select many images in Bridge, then choose Tools > Photoshop > Batch to apply a Photoshop action to all of them without any manual export needed. 

If there are Develop module edits applied to the images in Lightroom Classic, first make sure you’ve written out those edits to metadata outside of the catalog (select the images in the Library module and choose Metadata > Save Metadata to Files). That will let Bridge and Camera Raw see the edits so that Photoshop can have Camera Raw apply those edits to each image before Photoshop runs the action on them.

Another option: If the Photoshop actions are basic, such as image correction, resizing, and exporting to specific specs, then consider remaking them as presets in Lightroom Classic to achieve the equivalent results. Lightroom Classic presets will run much faster than Photoshop actions because Lightroom Classic can apply them in parallel using multiple CPU cores, and batch exporting in Lightroom Classic is GPU-accelerated. But if the actions use features only available in Photoshop, then you’ll have to stick to the slower method of running Photoshop actions as a batch.

It may be easier to run your actions as a batch from within Adobe Bridge. This will not work on a Lightroom collection but any folder on disk should work fine.