Another solution (possibly works in 2.8, too):
* Start the Crop tool, and tick the "Allow growing" , this uncovers the "Fill with" selector that you set to "Transparency".
* In your image window, make the crop shape outside the canvas (which is possible due to "Allow growing"):
- Crop1.jpg (47.78 KiB) Viewed 2465 times
* The transparency is added around the current image, there is no need to add an alpha channel:
- Crop2.jpg (49.61 KiB) Viewed 2465 times
* Export to some format that supports transparency of course.