A judge is not a tape

No - a judge cannot estimate size from a photo, and a professional one will not try. A photo has no reference object, no fixed angle and no way to correct for foreshortening, so any figure pulled from one is a guess handed back as if it were data.

Why the estimate cannot work

Camera distance changes apparent size more than the thing itself does, and a photo does not carry the information a judge would need to correct for it. The effect is documented even for faces: Ward and colleagues' 2018 model in JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery showed that short-distance photographs increase perceived nasal size through camera geometry alone. A judge who has done this work for a while knows this and will decline the estimate rather than produce a confident-sounding wrong number, because a wrong number with a straight face is worse than no number at all. This is a different failure mode from the register-flavoured numbers judges do give inside a rating - those are a rhetorical gesture, not an attempt at measurement, and conflating the two is where this request usually starts.

Ask for the right thing

If a number is genuinely what you want, that request belongs somewhere else entirely: a proper measurement, taken with a ruler against a stated method, removes the guessing a photo estimate cannot avoid. It also produces something you can actually compare against other numbers later, which an opinion never will, however specific the opinion is. An AI scoring tool has the same limitation a judge does when working from an image alone - it is reading pixels, not a body, and neither route substitutes for the tape.

What to ask a judge for instead

A judge is good at responding to what you send in whatever register you asked for - that is the actual product, and it is worth asking for on its own terms rather than smuggling a measurement question inside it. Writing a request that works covers what to put in a brief instead: register, length, one specific, and the kind of detail a judge can actually respond to. An automated scoring tool at least prices this consistency into its interface, showing a fixed number against a fixed scale rather than a guess dressed as one, which is the honest version of what a photo estimate from a judge is pretending to be. If measurement and rating both matter to you, do them separately and in that order - a stated figure removes a whole line of guessing from the judge's side and gets you a better clip, not just a more honest one. If you are still weighing which of these routes you actually want, Rate Cock's comparison of an AI read against a human one is a better starting point than trying to get an answer out of a photo the wrong tool was never built to give.