The crop as a score variable

Yes - cropping alone can change a score, because a tighter or looser crop of the same photo is a different image to a rating tool. The crop sets how much of the frame the subject fills and what context surrounds it, and the model scores both.

Two things a crop changes at once

The first is fill ratio: how much of the total frame the subject occupies. A tight crop puts the subject at a large fraction of the image; a loose one leaves it small against a wider field. The second is context: what surrounds the subject, and how much of it there is for the tool to also register. These move independently of each other - you can tighten a crop and still leave clutter in what remains, or loosen one onto an otherwise plain background - which is why crop is worth treating as its own variable rather than folding it into "framing" as a single vague idea.

Why two crops of one photo can score differently

If a rubric has any axis sensitive to proportion or presentation, fill ratio feeds it directly - a subject occupying more of the frame is not the same input as the identical subject occupying less of it, even though the underlying photo never changed. Context does something similar to any axis reading the whole image rather than an isolated region, since a model does not selectively ignore what a crop chose to leave in. Research on image models points the same way: Azulay and Weiss (2019) showed that "small translations or rescalings of the input image can drastically change" a convolutional network's prediction, and that neither the architecture nor data augmentation fully prevents it. The result is that recropping alone, with the source photograph held completely fixed, is enough to move a number - which is itself a fact worth knowing, because it isolates how sensitive a given tool is to something that has nothing to do with the subject.

Why a protocol fixes the crop

The fix is the same shape as every other variable on this list: decide the crop in advance, apply it the same way each time, write down what "the same way" means precisely enough to repeat. A fixed fraction of the frame, a fixed set of reference points to crop to - shoulders, a doorframe edge, whatever is available and stable - turns crop from a source of drift into a held constant. Making a submission comparable treats crop as one entry on a short list of things to fix before a second result can be read against a first; this is the expanded version of that one line.

Tight against loose, worked through

Take the same photo two ways: cropped tight enough that the subject fills most of the frame, and cropped loose enough that a third of the frame is background either side. The tight version maximises fill ratio and minimises context, which can push a presentation-sensitive axis in one direction; the loose version does the reverse, giving the tool more surrounding image to weigh alongside the subject, which is not neutral either. Neither crop is "correct" and neither is cheating - they are two different inputs built from one photograph, and the only way to know which a given tool prefers is to try both once and see whether the tool's response is stable or sensitive to the change. That single test is informative even if the answer turns out to be "it barely matters" - a tool insensitive to crop is telling you something about how it works, just as one that moves noticeably is.

What sits next to this and what does not

Crop and background are related but distinct: crop decides how much of the frame the background occupies, while what actually sits in that background is a separate question with its own answer. Recropping a single source photo several ways and comparing the results is also a useful diagnostic in its own right, one this post is not attempting - that belongs to a different piece of writing.

What the model does with what is left in frame

A tool does not selectively attend to the subject and discard the rest; it encodes whatever the crop handed it, context included. That is the mechanism behind everything above, and it is also why cropping tightly is not a way to "help" the tool focus - it changes the input, not the tool's attention.

Beyond the score

None of this touches an actual measurement, which comes from a tape and a documented method, not a frame, and a crop has no bearing on it either way. The same crop discipline matters if the photo goes to a human judge instead of a model - a viewer reacts to fill ratio and context too, and Rate Cock's photo guide specifies both for exactly that reason.