I'm not sure whether the use of the cropping trick was an indication that he was playing dumb (and outright lying) in his other claims, or if he really was that spectacularly deficient in spatial reasoning ability and did it purely by accident or by following some misguided "technique". (or got them from someone else...)
That's a question White took with him to the grave. As I said, we have speculated for years whether White's colossal displays of poor spatial reasoning were affected or real. Given that he seems to fit well the classic Dunning-Kruger model, I tend to think they were real and that White's charisma and other factors allowed him to translate that stunning inability into some degree of fame. If he was faking his spatial dysfunction, he was remarkably consistent with it. His notorious inability to determine the orientation of the lunar module from photographs was the stuff of riotous ridicule -- justly so.
In addition to crop-and-resize, which could be attributed to simple problems with spatial reasoning, White also undertook some activity that's harder to dismiss as only incompetence. In an infamous case, he assembled small sections of different photographs to establish a ridgeline for a mountain range, which he argued was identical to one appearing in a different photo from a different mission. It's hard to argue that this degree of deliberate misrepresentation is accidental or the product of ignorance.