The search for the strangest Adobe setting continues in Lightroom, where the first option in the Interface section is… end marks:

Presently, only one option is there…

…but at least back in 2012 there were many more:

What does it do? It adds an old-time’y glyph at the end of either left or right panel.

The internet is rife with people perplexed by this option and I cannot deny – I’m one of them. (The title of this post is a reaction of one of the users.) It feels like such a peculiar way to add delight.

You are not limited to the pre-existing (one) flourish, as you can upload your own. Some people add a logo of their production studio, but John Beardsworth found a more creative use:

Alternatively, with a tiny bit of imagination you can exploit an often-forgotten detail of Lightroom’s interface – the “panel end marks”. These decorations at the bottom of Lightroom’s panels have often been derided as a waste of programming time, but in fact they can be made to serve more than their somewhat-trivial purpose. And as you can see in the examples on this page, they can serve as a reminder of star ratings, colour labels and even keyboard shortcuts for flags.

This is a fascinating hack, and an example of William Gibson’s famous “the street finds its own uses for things.” It made me curious why didn’t onscreen interfaces ever evolve to allow you to annotate them easily? You see stuff like this a lot in real life…

…but the Lightroom end mark hack is the only thing that comes to my mind where an onscreen UI got this kind of a treatment – and the feature wasn’t even intended for that use.