From my point of view the crop settings of images should be handled at file level and on file reference level. We have some customers with quit big TYPO3 instances, and they use defined crop variants all over the whole page. Every time the add a file reference the editor has to set the same crop variants again and again and again. If the (default) crop variant could be set at file level and be overwritten at file reference level this would be a huge advantage.
I’m aware that this may is not a simple topic since custom crop variants on element level are possible. I just want to share my thoughts and may start a discussion.
Our current solution to make life easier for editors is a small extension to render responsive images. This Extension adds - apart from other fields - a ratio field with some common presets (1:1, 16:9,…). If this field has a valid ratio, all the images for this content element are cropped in that specific ratio. The crop editor can be used in combination: the content-element-crop is than cropped from the crop-area. If the field is empty, it behaves like the TYPO3 defaults and you can crop each image individually.
This is very useful for multiple images in one content element and a clean output with the same sizes in frontend. But this wouldn’t solve your problem to have all references of the same image with the same crop.
I like the idea to define a crop also on file level (maybe even with crop variants).
Does the file-reference crop override the file level crop? Or can it only be cropped from inside the file crop?