Crop tool precision - can it snap to whole pixels?

Question

One thing that drives myself and every other designer I know crazy in Photoshop are tools that do not allow precisie snapping to the edges of whole pixels This is not such a problem with printed media and there are valid reasons to allow certain tools to snap to the midpoint of a pixel and it is nice to have the option to turn that on and off. However as a web designer I have a problem that has been getting on my nerves for several years and maybe there is another way I could approach this I am not thinking of.
Aside from templates where I can spend the time to create slices and export them as such, most often I am working on graphics that require me to select an area and crop / save for web on the fly.
Here is the problem.
The Crop Tool does not snap to whole pixels, or guides, or document bounds very precisely at all. Compare snapping to guides with a standard marquee box vs the crop tool and you will see what I mean. The marquee snaps with gusto, while you never really know if the crop tool is sitting halfway across a pixel without zooming far in (and even then I am not sure). The marquee ALWAYS selects whole pixels and cannot select a "half pixel" regardless of how much you try.
Because of this, I am forced to use the Marquee tool to select my area for cropping and using the "crop" command from the menu since it is the only way to crop with the marquee. However, the problem with THIS method is that photoshop does not preserve your layered content outside of those bounds. Therefore any Layer Effects (especially shadows) are changed drastically to the point where shadows do not line up across multiple slices (if individually exporting them this way).
Sometimes I am re-adjusting an ad layout to another size, and need to crop without losing the content outside of those bounds. Sometimes I just need to keep shadows etc intact. Sometimes I need that content outside the bounds for motion graphics purposes etc.
This is all just a bunch of hot air to essentially say I cannot find a way to EASILY crop, snapping to precise pixels AND keep the content outside of the new document bounds intact for further manipulation in a layered document.
Is there a way to do this I am not thinking about? Can you make the crop tool snap to whole pixels and/or force the crop command in the menu to follow the same preference setting you gave the crop tool in terms of keeping the content outside of your new bounds from being deleted?
I'd appreciate any suggestions on this.
If Adobe actually reads this stuff, I can assure that EVERY SINGLE photoshop artist I have ever talked to about this has the exact same complaint. I know hundreds of people who hate this (even the non-web designers who don't need as much pixel precision).

Answer 1

It never really hampers my productivity but this morning I had to crop an ad down to a smaller size and just started thinking of this...
I always drag a marquee selection out (box) when I need to add a guide to my document to ensure that my guides snap to the pixel edge.
One thing I just did that seemed to work with the crop tool well was setting the grid settings to a gridline every 10px with 10 subdivisions in preferences and then turning on the grid when using the crop tool. It does not seem to snap unless you are actually viewing the grid but the tool snaps to individual pixels.
Typically in my normal work flow when I am in the zone and just doing things without thinking, I drag a marquee around to set my guides for cropping, then draw a marquee box snapping to those guides, flatten image to make sure layer effects stay intact, crop, save, use history window to go back to un-flattened state, move on...
It would be cool to be able to use the crop command after drawing the marquee without destroying the layer content outside the new bounds, even a seperate command that adjusts the "canvas size" to the marquee bounds would be fine.
Its not something I consider to be broken but honestly when I deal with designers who are not web developers, one of the major issues I get with PSDs that need to be chopped up for a web site is pixels not being precicise and boxes being drawn with half-pixels and guides sitting in the middle of pixels. It is indicitave of something that could be improved for my own productivity sake AND to help designers keep things snappy and tight in their comps.
I've had to re-build countless nav-bars, and other elements because of blurry pixels, non-precisely measured spacings, etc etc to ever count. But at the same time it is good to have something to be paid for LOL.