intothelens,
Your screenshot is most interesting because that shows the full version of Camera Raw that would be included with an application such as Photoshop (creative cloud), so what your asking about, as far as i know, is not supposed or intended to work, since Photoshop Elements is not part of the Creative Cloud license that is required in order to use the full Camera Raw plugin, hence that's the reason you get the "camera raw requires a qualifying product" message.
Although the behavior of being able to open the full Camera Raw in Bridge by various means without having a qualifying program/application has been reported in the past, usually it's just been attributed to a hiccup in the licensing.
On the Mac side from Photoshop Elements 3 to Photoshop Elements 8, Bridge was included with Photoshop Elements instead of the Organizer and very often, even though Photoshop Elements had it's own version of ACR like Photoshop Elements 2025 does, users were able to access the full ACR (Camera Raw) version that was installed with Bridge even though Adobe didn't officially support it.
The Camera Raw version you get when using Open in Camera Raw from within the Photoshop Elements 2025 Editor is different in that it has less features than the full ACR version in your screenshot.
Which versions are you older Photoshop and Bridge?
Are they installed on the same Win 11 as Photoshop Elements 2025?
In Bridge you can go to Edit>Preferences>File Type Associations and select the program that is the default for opening files, however, Camera Raw cannot be set because it's automatically the default for Camera Raw files.
Nor can Camera Raw be set in the Windows system settings to open file types in a particular program.
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