How to marquee and crop?

[Schlake]

I'm giving up on Photoshop.  It's too hard trying to use it now that they've dropped support for the version I have and no sell more up to date versions of Photoshop.  But I'm hitting a wall trying to figure out how to replicate the functionality in Affinity Photo.   I've google this, and I see quite a bit of "you-can't-do-that" which I hope just isn't true...

Problem one, cropping.  In photoshop, I press 'm' (marquee), which defaults to a fixe-ratio shape, draw my shape, and use a macro to crop/resize/etc the image.  I can't even get that far in Affinity.  The 'm'  command does a marquee, but it has ratios.  I'd learned that from google.  I read that a shape could work, but those are based on the pen tool, which is again freehand, not a fixed ratio.  The crop tool does a fixed ratio, but it's a huge tool with lots of busy things going on and seems less than ideal for a simple task.  There is also the problem that the crop tool allows me to position it outside of the image which destroys the ratio I want to achieve.  I did find the snap option to crop, but it's overly complicated as well, and I can't just do the simple action of click-drag-release across an image and expect the area to be properly constrained by the image.

 

Is there something I'm missing?  What I want to do is have a tool that somehow selects a fixe ratio rectable of the image, constrained by the edges of the image, that I can crop the image to.  Something simple.  In Photoshop, it was 'M'-click-drag-release and I was done.  I'm hoping to find something similar here.

Edited July 18, 2019 by Schlake

[Fixx]

Crop tool should be the way to go, but you are right, it is too clumsy still. It should be possible to draw a crop area, but does not happen. Also, crop settings do not keep, it always defaults to current image ratio.