New idea for functionality in Photoshop

I think you already requested it the best way, you posted this in Photoshop/Ideas which is exactly where feature requests should go.

For example, if you look at the list of requests on the Ideas page, you can see what happens to requests that Adobe decides to act on. In the picture below, if you look at the parts called out in red, you can see that if Adobe becomes interested in an idea, an Adobe employee might respond in the comments, and might also assign a Status to it. The top example has a status of Under Review, and the bottom example has a status of Released (it made it into Photoshop). The top example got 527 votes, and the bottom one got 249 votes. Note that the number of votes doesn’t automatically prioritize them, because Adobe has additional priorities such as how easy it is to write, debug, and maintain the code, how consistent the change is with other Adobe apps, marketing priorities (some features are advanced sooner to keep up with the competition), and so on.

So, anyone’s idea has to compete with hundreds of other ideas to get Adobe attention and motivate them to allocate development resources to it. If they do, they publicly record their progress here.

That’s part of the reason it’s good to find examples that reinforce your case, like showing that Apple thinks this idea is important enough that they have already put it into every iPhone.

Thanks Conrad. That is exactly what I wish was available. Is there a better way to ask Adobe for this capability?

It sounds like you want something like the picture below. You’re not the first to ask about it here, and it looks like it’s becoming popular enough that the example below is from the Apple Photos app in the latest version of iOS on an iPhone:

1. Just viewing a photo (no special mode needed), if you zoom the photo, the app displays a Crop button near the top right corner. If you tap that Crop button…

2. …the area that was visible within the phone screen border becomes the area enclosed by the crop rectangle on the second screen, then you can tap Done to confirm it.

If that’s what you’re looking for, Photoshop doesn’t provide a way to do that right now, and many pros and veteran Photoshop users may not understand why anyone would want to crop to a window or screen. (I don’t think I ever would, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done.) If what is shown below is more or less what you’re looking for, then you can use that as an existing mass market example of what you wish Photoshop could do.

Apparently Apple thinks enough people want to crop according to what’s visible on their screen, so that now anyone with an iPhone can do it in Apple Photos without first having to go into Edit mode.

I personally have no problem making a rectangular selection and using transform selection to adjust the selection. A friend asked if you could make a selection of the pixels visible in a zoomed floating window with keyboard shortcuts much as you would obtain if you used Command-A on the whole image. I told him that a floating window is not a crop tool but he would like to be able to select the pixels visible in a smaller zoomed floating window. Adobe suggested I submit this as a feature upgrade for future release. 

Could you elaborate a little bit, perhaps with a screenshot? What is the problem you need to solve, which isn't achieved with just selecting a part of the image?