Patrick Gilmour

Answer: swipe left with a finger across the file icon on the main window and tap on the first icon that is revealed.
You can’t seem to do this with a mouse so I was missing it.

Yep. I've basically stopped recommending Affinity Photo to everyone. Early on I could overlook obvious clunky workflow problems as first generation growing pains. The Affinity software seemed promising, but with over six years of fairly regular updates the first gen excuse doesn't hold up anymore. The fact that they are still missing basic features present in all other Photo editors just tells me they are making a "my way or the highway" type of statement without regard to efficient workflows. Maybe they'll change their mind at some point, but until then I'm relegating them to a niche player like Luminar. Nice, interesting features, but too many quirks and shortcomings.

I was going to quip "New here?" but I see you've posted in this thread before.
@ppp There are two kinds of people in the world this thread: those who believe with a religious fervor that this feature is (relatively) simple to implement and also essential to their workflow, and those who believe with a religious fervor that there are other multi-step methods to accomplish the same result so what's the big fuss?
I'm of the former, and if you had endured all 12 pages of this thread, you'd have uncovered two comments that are actually useful. Lucky for you, and hopefully for the next few commenters who might see this comment, I've already found them, and use them myself as a nearly-acceptable alternative to actually having the feature implemented.  These are not "well do these 18 things and it's the same" answers.
The author of this comment uploaded a macro, which no longer seems to be on the forum's servers, so I've taken the liberty of uploading it with this comment. @carl123 if that's not OK let me know and I'll take it down. The macro simply crops to your selection...make your selection and run the macro. Despite the name it works with more than two selections.
This comment includes a video demonstrating that you can make your selection, then use snapping with the crop tool to make the crop; in my opinion that's better than any of the other multi-step alternatives.
Crop to 2 Selections.afmacros

Just another poor user here, slowly tearing their hair out as they try to move to Affinity Photo. Let it be clear, I hate Adobe and use Photoshop only because my employer gives it to me. However, I use Crop to Selection every day to quickly trim screenshots (and sometimes make more complex selections), and it is an obvious feature that must be added to Photo for efficient workflow - why else are so many people screaming out for it here? Perhaps what concerns me as much, is that if any Affinity staff read these forums, why have they ignored customers for so long, just like Adobe do?

But it doesn't. It isn't always better.
Dragging those crop handles is better sometimes, but sometimes it's just fundamentally worse than cropping to selection. Unless I'm missing something, maybe? Let's say I have 30 layers with icons on. I want to crop to the biggest icon of the layers. In Photoshop I can just select that one by shift clicking on the layer list, highlighting the outline as a selection, then crop to selection. No dragging to find the edges, just a couple of clicks and it's done. I've not seen a single workaround method for Affinity Photo that can do that even close to as easily. Maybe I've missed it. But the Affinity method is only "better" under some circumstances.
And as others have said, having it simply automatically snap the current crop tool to the selected area gives the best of both worlds.
I genuinely don't understand the reluctance so many on these forums have to conceding that this might occasionally be useful.

In which case, a simple solution would be to provide an option to "Convert Marquee to Crop". Maybe cmd/ctrl+click Crop tool. Then by hitting Return the crop would be applied and—hopefully—everyone would be happy.
Very often a user will be using selection tools to create a marquee that they want to convert quickly to a crop.
In my own use, I'd often cmd+click on a Layer to define its contents as the area I want to define the crop. Maybe it was pixels. Maybe it was an object I drew for the purpose.
I taught Photoshop for many years as a Certified Instructor/Expert. 'Crop to Selection' was always in the course content because it was so useful.
 

In which case, a simple solution would be to provide an option to "Convert Marquee to Crop". Maybe cmd/ctrl+click Crop tool. Then by hitting Return the crop would be applied and—hopefully—everyone would be happy.
Very often a user will be using selection tools to create a marquee that they want to convert quickly to a crop.
In my own use, I'd often cmd+click on a Layer to define its contents as the area I want to define the crop. Maybe it was pixels. Maybe it was an object I drew for the purpose.
I taught Photoshop for many years as a Certified Instructor/Expert. 'Crop to Selection' was always in the course content because it was so useful.
 

Adding another voice to this request. Sure there are more cumbersome ways of achieving the result, but a simple, clean "select an area, crop to that area" option would be much much more preferable.

I genuinely confused by how this is still a matter of debate. The request is so simple, so reasonable, and for a method so much easier than any of the alternative methods being suggested. I'm baffled by why anyone would *not* want this feature to be available. It's absolutely the thing I miss most about Photoshop. Sure I can achieve the same result with considerably more effort, but I've not seen a single good reason why the feature as requested couldn't or shouldn't be implemented. What am I missing here?

@Patrick Connor
Version 1.9.2 is still showing the painfully slow start-up - seen this since November 2020 now...
I've made numerous copies of the apps since that was discovered as a workaround.
Is Serif really incapable of providing a quick fix to this bug that doesn't seem to exist in any other apps I've seen? Could you not prioritize it higher?
Thanks!
 
 

Not to my knowledge, but I could see it as a useful addition.

Updated to Version 1.9.2 hoping that the weird long delay program launch would be resolved. Are you guys running low on capital?  Does your software engineering team not think this is something that is mission critical?  So here we are months on and still no answer to the painfully slow startup of the Affinity software suite.
Kinda unbelieveable. 
Please fix this!

The bug is fixed. What is not fixed, is the idea of only having straight lines as continuous lines. What if you want to draw a bunch of parallels lines quickly?
Is there a way to quickly draw non-continuous but straight lines? 

Readers,
From a number of reports it seems the work around of making a copy of your application may have been "blocked" from working by a recent macOS update. If so it's no longer a suitable work-around. Frankly it was surprising that making a copy worked anyway, and if Apple have spotted the mistake and blocked it then that would seem logical, as all applications should be security checked.
We are working with Apple on this and having another look at why they are treating our application in a way as to not trust it each time the application is started after the machine restarts. We hope we have a possible solution and will try it internally. Rest assured we are working hard on solving this problem. 

Hi @Willem Jan Drijfhout,
I'm sorry the inconvenience this is causing you (and everyone else). We are indeed looking into it and in contact with Apple to see where the problem lies and what we can do about it. Thanks for your patience and understanding.

I would like to see this too.
If they don't want to implement the standard convention in most other photo editors (Image > Crop), I would settle for choosing the crop tool and having a single button next to the cancel button that says "Selection" which immediately auto crops to the selection edges.  That would be roughly the same amount of steps as Document > Crop or whatever.
I noticed the Crop tool does snap manually to a fuzzy selection edge if you have "Snap to pixel selection bounds" turned on, but that is still fiddly compared to the quick Image > Crop feature in other programs.

Guys, could we keep this on-topic for Crop to Selection, please, and move the Vector Brush discussion to another thread?
I'm a Photoshop ACE/ACI (instructor), understand that there are a lot of different workflow requirements out there, but I have consistently seen Crop to Selection used by a diversity of users in Photoshop and would like to see an option in Photo that is as simple and quick to use.
The suggestion, perhaps through a Preference setting, to allow the crop tool to default to a rectangle that that contains the selection so the user can then simply press 'Return' to crop sounds like a good one. Hopefully Affinity will consider adding this as an option.

Guys, could we keep this on-topic for Crop to Selection, please, and move the Vector Brush discussion to another thread?
I'm a Photoshop ACE/ACI (instructor), understand that there are a lot of different workflow requirements out there, but I have consistently seen Crop to Selection used by a diversity of users in Photoshop and would like to see an option in Photo that is as simple and quick to use.
The suggestion, perhaps through a Preference setting, to allow the crop tool to default to a rectangle that that contains the selection so the user can then simply press 'Return' to crop sounds like a good one. Hopefully Affinity will consider adding this as an option.

Guys, could we keep this on-topic for Crop to Selection, please, and move the Vector Brush discussion to another thread?
I'm a Photoshop ACE/ACI (instructor), understand that there are a lot of different workflow requirements out there, but I have consistently seen Crop to Selection used by a diversity of users in Photoshop and would like to see an option in Photo that is as simple and quick to use.
The suggestion, perhaps through a Preference setting, to allow the crop tool to default to a rectangle that that contains the selection so the user can then simply press 'Return' to crop sounds like a good one. Hopefully Affinity will consider adding this as an option.

Simple gripe of the day?   This thread has been going on for nearly 4 years...1,396 days to be exact.    This is a standard feature available in many image editing apps, including Photoshop, MS Paint, Paint.NET, Gimp, and Paintshop Pro.   The kicker is the most basic programs, like Paint and Paint.NET, have this feature.

It's pretty sad to see this going on for 8 pages and the devs not adding a simple command for this, saving everyone's time and effort. It just needs a macro that resizes the canvas to the selection's bounding box. I knew this wasn't here since it was one of the first things I tried many years ago, but I thought to check just in case.
Simple things like this make Affinity hard to recommend. You won a lot of users with the rapid initial development; users that had the expectation development would continue with that pace when they invested their time into using Affinity. But it has been stale for years now... It really gives the wrong impression.

Why are we talking about vector brushes in a crop to selection forum thread?

You don't even have to click Apply (in the UI), you can just press the return key.
So if "To Selection" was a mode for the current cropping tool that is saved as preference, you could just
- select something
- press C
- press return
- done

I run non-MAS versions of all Serif app and and have the slow-start-up issue on all of them. It began some time round the end of last year.
I'll try making a copy of an app and restart...
[later...]
Okay, made a duplicate of Designer (CMD+D), launched it, quit it, restarted Mac and launched... took about 5 seconds to launch on MacBook Pro (MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2016, Four Thunderbolt 3 Ports) 3.1 GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i5 16 GB 2133 MHz LPDDR3)... Big Sur 11.1
[repeating for Designer and Photo...]
Maybe interesting to note that the initial "Verifying..." dialog takes about 20 seconds for app on launch after copying... permissions?
[second restart...]
Seems that all three non-MAS apps are now launching as fast as expected (4-10 seconds each). Weird fix, but if this might be a fix. Will post back if slow launch returns.
[third restart...]
looks like the fix sticks... thanks @Patrick Connor

Just to add, non-MAS version on Intel Mac (3.1 GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i5 | 16GB RAM) is showing the same problem on my Mac running Big Sur 11.0.1
Publisher, Photo and Designer are all taking 25-30 second to launch. Previously it was less than half this.