question about plugin menus

[leer44346667]

In LRC, I have installed the plugins for Luminar Neo and Topaz Photo AI. There seem to be two ways to get to the plugins. One is File->Plugin Extras, the other is right clicking on the photo, the selecting "Edit In". 

Question- why does Luminar Neo show up in both menu options, but Topaz is missing in the Right Click/Edit-In menu?

[Michael J. Hoffman]

This is a question about Lightroom Classic; I'll move it to the LrC forum since this was posted originally in Photoshop Ecosystem.

The "Plug-In Extras" entries are determined by the application installing a plug-in. The "Edit In" settings are configurable whether there is a plug-in or not; many applications could be configured in the "Edit In" Menu and you can update, add or remove items from that menu by going to Preferences > External Editing > Additional External Edito and creating or modifying any of the presets in the dropdown list.

[leer44346667]

Thank you

[C.Cella]

@leer44346667 you can decide which secondary external editor to use.

Luminar probably appears in the right clikc menu for that reason.

I doubt the Plug-in overwrote the preferences and set itself as the default secondary editor.

Some Plug-in also install themselves in the LrModules.

I am unsure if this gives them some advantage/priority over others.

@johnrellis can perhaps weight on this as I have not ever tried it.

[johnrellis · Accepted solution]

Summarizing and building on the previous replies:

An external editor can be invoked one of two ways:

1. Via an external-editor preset, which appears in the Photo > Edit In and right-click Edit In submenus. Users can define such presets in Preferences > External Editing.  Third-party apps can install their own presets by placing them in the "External Editor Presets" folder of the Lightroom settings folder. (You get to that folder by doing Preferences > Presets > Show All Other Lightroom Presets.)  The presets are .lrtemplate files that you can examine in a text editor.

External editors invoked this way have limited control over how they're invoked, just the parameters that you see in Preferences > External Editing.

2. Via a plugin, which can appear in File > Plug-in Extras or Library > Plug-in Extras. The plugin provides much more flexibility in how the external editor is invoked and saves its results.

The plugin can be installed by the user manually via File > Plug-in Manager or by copying it into Modules subfolder of the Lightroom settings folder.  Installers for third-party services often use the second method, so that users don't have to do it manually. 

LR automatically loads all plugins it finds in the Modules subfolder. The user can enable and disable such plugins File > Plug-in Manager but can't remove them. The only way to remove them from LR is by removing the plugin's .lrplugin file from the Modules folder.  Other than that, there's no difference between installing the plugin manually or having it installed via Modules.

[john beardsworth · Accepted solution]

In LRC, I have installed the plugins for Luminar Neo and Topaz Photo AI. There seem to be two ways to get to the plugins. One is File->Plugin Extras, the other is right clicking on the photo, the selecting "Edit In". 

Question- why does Luminar Neo show up in both menu options, but Topaz is missing in the Right Click/Edit-In menu?

By @leer44346667

Because there's more than one way for a plugin author to tell Lightroom to send a file to their external application.

Luminar have written their plugin to use the File > Plugin menu, which triggers code inside the plugin to send the photo to the Luminar application. I would guess that the plugin installation or initialisation process also adds a file to LR's settings folder "External Editor Presets" which would make Lightroom call the Luminar application directly (ie not via the plugin).

Topaz must have chosen only the first, and it's hard to be sure why. It may be that they need to do something to the file before it hits their application, whereas Edit With operates more like dropping a file on their executable and wouldn't have that possibility. It might just be that they thought it would be confusing to have it in two places.