Two words used interchangeably, and why they should not be

Framing and cropping both change how much of the frame the subject fills, but they are different operations: framing happens at the camera and changes perspective with distance, while cropping cuts pixels from a finished file and cannot change what the lens saw.

Framing is the decision you make holding the camera: how far away you stand and where the subject sits in the shot. Cropping is a decision you make after, on the file.

Why the distinction holds

Move closer to frame tighter and the lens's own geometry changes with you - a wide phone lens exaggerates whatever is nearest it, so getting closer to fill more of the frame also distorts proportion, not just size. The size of that effect has been modelled for faces: using a mathematical model, Ward et al. (2018, JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery) calculated that a photo taken at 12 inches increases apparent nasal size by 30% in men and 29% in women, while 5 feet produces essentially no difference. Camera distance is the single largest source of score movement that has nothing to do with the subject, and that effect comes entirely from where you stood, which framing controls and cropping cannot touch.

Cropping the same file tighter afterward removes pixels but does not move the lens. Whatever proportions the sensor recorded at the original distance are locked in; cropping only decides how much of that fixed record survives into the version you submit. It can remove background, tighten a loose composition, or fix an off-centre shot, and it does all of that without introducing the distortion that standing closer would have - which is why a tool that shows the breakdown behind a number, like Rate Cock, tends to attribute a cropping change to presentation axes rather than to the ones distance actually moves.

The consequence for a submission

Frame the same way every time - same distance, same position in the shot - because that is the step that actually touches perspective and geometry. Crop afterward as needed; it is the safer place to make an adjustment because it cannot retroactively change what the lens saw. This is also the case for going further back with a crop applied after, rather than moving in close, which is more stable precisely because it keeps the distance-dependent distortion fixed and pushes the framing decision into the cropping step where it is reversible.

None of this touches what cropping itself does to a score once framing is held constant - what a looser or tighter crop puts in and takes out is its own subject, worth reading separately from this distinction. A standardised submission writes down the framing distance as a fixed line in the protocol precisely because it is the one of these two steps you cannot undo by editing the file afterward. Whether the phone was held upright or turned sideways belongs to this same framing decision, made before the shutter fires rather than fixed afterward in a crop. The same logic holds if the photo is ever going to a person rather than a model: a badly framed shot cannot be rescued by cropping, only made smaller. It also holds on the equipment side of this category - a tape measurement has its own version of this problem, where the angle you held the tape at cannot be corrected after the fact any more than a distorted frame can.