bobfitz Loc: Kendall-Miami, Florida

You are putting the cart before the horse. What are you going to do with this photo. Not all photos can be cropped to 16x9 without losing valuable parts of the photo. you need to look at your photo with all crop formats to make the right decision. I have found that it is best to understand the final crop of the photo before I shoot. When in doubt, shoot wider to allow for future cropping decisions.

BudsOwl Loc: Upstate NY and New England

One of my favorite pictures was the round stone barn with late summer flowers in the foreground at Hancock Shaker Village. I took it at 2x3 ratio and cropped it to 4x5 and had prints made at 16 x 20 and 8 x 10. I gave the larger print to my daughter who had it triple matted and framed for display in her living room (her husband was brought up on a dairy farm). I then double matted the smaller print and put it in a 11x14 frame and gave it to her daughter (my oldest grandchild) who has it hanging in her dining room. I also sold a double matted and framed 8 x 10 which I had hanging along with other pictures in a local library. I also cropped the original to 16 x 9 and had it double matted and framed professionally and it is hanging in my living room. So some times different sizes work in different places.
Bud

Sinewsworn Loc: Port Orchard, WA

I constrain in LR and crop for print.

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

Wallen Loc: Middle Earth

A: Crop to where it looks the best

or

B: Crop it according to what it will be used for.

A. Let the image speak for itself and cropping for its artistic & visual impact is one great way and guide, how an image should be cropped.
I.E. Some images look best when it is cropped to square or even diamonds.

B. Where it will be used is a limiting factor/target to accomplish that will dictate how a crop should be done.
I.E. if the purpose is to frame the images, then the frames proportion and shape will dictate the crop.
For a webpage, magazine spread or header, a wide crop may be the most appropriate.

Delderby Loc: Derby UK

Because sensor pixel numbers have greatly increased, it seems that most photographers no longer bother with the adage "fill the frame". Add that lost skill to AI and phones, and the raison d'etre of photography as a hobby will soon be gone.

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

The only constant in life is change.

Adapt.

Architect1776 Loc: In my mind

Most still try to get it correct in the camera still.
There are other reasons to crop.
Using perspective corrections, desire to have a longer horizontal, vertical than the sensor has available etc.

profbowman Loc: Harrisonburg, VA, USA

Even with sensor sizes of 24 MP and larger, I still find it worthwhile to check the width and height in inchesof cropped or shrunken images. So, by using the dpi or ppi
setting (whichever your editing software uses) most software will tell the user what the fundamental size of the resulting images will be. I would not trust a printer driver to scale an image larger without my getting to see what it looks like at 100% viewing size on my computer.

If this seems strange, the take-away is not top print your image too large without checking out how it looks. --Richard

Delderby Loc: Derby UK