How to create Bridge Collection from a list of filepaths? Or how to view Indesign links without pack

Starting with a blank plain text file in a text editor that supports regular expression/grep based find and replace, start with the following 4 lines of text:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8' standalone='yes' ?>
<arbitrary_collection version='1'>

</arbitrary_collection>

Line 3 is blank for a reason, you will paste your list of files into this empty placeholder line, once you have correctly prepared them...

Presuming Windows OS, you would start with something like this in a second text document:

C:/Users/username/Pictures/photo.jpg
C:/Users/username/Pictures/image.tif

Then you would use a regular expression based find/replace to insert the following before the full image paths:

<file uri='bridge:fs:file:///

The first regular expression find/replace would be:

Find: ^

Replace: <file uri='bridge:fs:file:///

You then need to close off the line with:

'>

So the second regular expression find/replace would be:

Find: $

Replace: '>

The final result would be:

<file uri='bridge:fs:file:///C:/Users/username/Pictures/photo.jpg'>
<file uri='bridge:fs:file:///C:/Users/username/Pictures/image.tif'>

Once this has been done, it would all be pasted into the empty placeholder line in the other text file, then saved as a plain text file with a .filelist extension rather than .txt (.collection is used for Smart Collections).

NOTE: It is also possible to use a spreadsheet and the =CONCACTENATE formula rather than a regular expression based text editor.

Some sort of scripting/text munging would be needed. Either in Bridge or using a text editor like BBEdit/Notepad++.