My version 7.0 of Lightroom (Not LRC) does not show a Plug-In Manager in the File drop down menu. Any suggestions as to why this is not showing? Thanks!
If the Nik collection can be run as standalone apps, then yes that would be the only way to use them and then manually importing the created output file back into Lightroom. Which is obviously not as ideal as running them as plug-ins from within Lightroom.
There'll be a feature request here in the forum to allow plug-in support to Lightroom, you could perhaps add your vote to it.