Lightroom 5: Healing brush sources from outside cropped area

I don't mind that so much, but when it gets it wrong, and it very often does, there's no easy way to change the source area without leaving the Spot Removal tool, and re-cropping the image to include the source so you can move it! This is very inconvenient!

Actually, there is - the forward slash "/" key will cause it to reselect the source. Just hit it a few times until it selects a source you like or selects one inside your crop so you can select it yourself.

Yes, as I mention above, this is a fairly hit and miss affair of doing something that should be very simple!

So the developers' intention was that the source area should be outside the user's reach?

Using the entire image area as potential source area is acceptable if - and only if - the user has access to that area while using the tool. And I don't see a reason for not implementing that: Show the entire image area while using the healing brush. Even if the tool hasn't automatically selected a source outside the crop area, the user may want to.

This is a typical design bug:
The software functions as the developers intended. But the developers had the wrong intentions. This type of bug is the worst type because it rarely get fixed.

Just to be clear, as I mentioned, the current behavior is as designed. That said, I agree that this aspect of the Spot Removal workflow can be improved, and have delivered this feedback to our engineers. Please look for improvements in this area in a future release.

Wasn't expected by me. Don't recall ever running into that in previous versions either. Glad to see it's going to be fixed (hope I interpreted your last comment correctly).