Teched4u,
You shouldn't lose most of your photo. When I need to do what you are doing, I simply resize, without resampling, so that one of my dimensions is the desired size. 10 inches high for example. You will have to resize the dimension that, when sized correctly, will force the other dimension to be too large. At that point, you haven't yet thrown any pixels away. Then, crop to get the desired size.
Of course, in many cases, I can crop out areas of the photo that aren't important as an aid to reaching my goal.