Revert to original – any way to defeat this?

In Photo Gallery I used to be able to edit a photo and click MAKE A COPY to save a copy of the edited version together with a non-destructively edited original. The edited copy would only contain the edited version and could not be reverted to the original.

Today I discovered that somehow this has changed, now the edited copy can also be reverted after I inadvertently clicked REVERT TO ORIGINAL and lost all the editing work.

Is there any way to save the edition copy as something that cannot be reverted? This is especially applicable in scanned photos as I scan 5 photos together in one letter-sized frame and then crop them into the 5 individual photos to be saved. Now the 5 individually saved files actually contain all the same information of the original scan instead of just 1/5 of it, wasting a lot of memory. And if I inadvertently click REVERT TO ORIGINAL, I would have to do all the cropping and editing over again. The MAKE A COPY button becomes redundant as the copy and the original are identical. I would like to save each individual photo as an edited ORIGINAL and not as an edited COPY.