Storing meta about a cropped photo
Let's order things by complexity and performance.


The cropped image will be displayed many times.  And cropping is a rather complex process.  So, store the cropped image as a file.  Note:  By storing as a file, you can simply use an &lt;img src=...&gt; tag in HTML to fetch it -- no extra processing (for you) when providing the web page.
Given that you are doing #1, the rest becomes somewhat moot.  Yes, you could store the original image somewhere, plus meta info about cropping.  But will you ever change the cropping?  Or maybe the only real use case is when the user resends the image and you redo the cropping?  My point is, you business model now takes over and answers what to do for #2; not database considerations.