From a developer perspective you're obviously correct, but from a user perspective it doesn't make sense that the tool discards information, especially when competing tools don't do that.
Of course as a developer that makes it all the more impressive - kudos to the team for making such big progress, I can't wait to play around with all the new improvements!
Cropping IS a destructive operation. If the program isn't throwing information away, then it doesn't actually do cropping, but some different operation instead.
From a user perspective I wouldn't like it, if I were to crop something and the data would be still there afterwards. That would be a data leak waiting to happen.
I genuinely can't empathize with this objection. To me it's basically the same as arguing against Undo/Redo in a text editor because someone could come along and press Undo on my keyboard after I've deleted sensitive data.
What percentage of users sends around raw project files from which they've cropped out sensitive data to users who shouldn't see that data, vs. what percentage of users ever wants to adjust the crop after applying other filters? The latter is basically everyone, the earlier I'm guessing at most 1%?
going by your text editor analogy, we are arguing against implementing undo/redo as a "non-destructive delete", based on adding backspace control characters within the text file. I want infinitw undo/redo, but i also want that when I delete a character it is really gone, not hidden!
