I've built an online photo tagging tool that has a low-res mirror of what is on my local laptop. I'd like to find an easy way to display the high-res version of a given image from my local file system.

Currently I have to get the image name from the web tool, paste it into Lightroom's search system and view that way. I'd like to be able to pull up the high res version, either in the browser or another local app, with a single click.

Options I've investigated:

HTML5 File API/FileReader()/fetch()
These cause even more friction than going to Lightroom, as the user has to select files via the OS file selector and the image directory structure is complex.

Configure local web server to host disk-based images
I've looked at hosting the local image directory with a simple web service, but would need to configure HTTPS to prevent cross-zone violations, and that's more client-side config than I'd prefer.

Any solution that would allow me to reference a local file path directly would work, but modern browsers have (rightly) eliminated most direct paths to local file access.

I'm wondering if there is a way to ask an app on the client side to open the file, in the way that browsers will prompt you for permission to open Zoom and join a meeting, or open a link in the client OS app store. If I could find some way to tell Lightroom to open the specific image without having to copy/paste file names, etc.