My experience on a dating website in 1997 did not include sharing photos before meeting. No one asked, no one offered. The site had origintated as a Compuserve bulletin board. There were 35 questions, including age, height, and weight, to attempt to establish compatibility, but many profiles had incomplete answers. A search algo attempted to establish a match percentage. I met fifteen women in person in 12 months. None were so disappointing in appearance that it detracted from the first meeting. I was invited to meet two of them at their hotel rooms, one in a hotel on job related business, but 250 miles from my location, and another flew up from that same city only to meet me. A third, "sight unseen" online relationship had already progressed to saying what we planned to do to each other, intimately, when we met. After meeting at a restaurant, she invited me to her apartment after we ate dinner and "drank in" what the other person looked like who we had become so comfortable with messaging and then on the telephone. The three ranged in age from late 20s to early 40s, their professions were architect, accountant, and chief of staff of a republican member of U.S. congress. I remained on good terms with all three after various lengths of dating, and later that year began a 4 year relationship with a woman I met on that same dating site who did not like messaging or phone. After meeting initially for coffee without first exchanging photos, I invited her to dinner 6 times over 6 weeks before she invited me past the doorman in the lobby of her residence.
Life is like a box of chocolates and I attribute my "interesting year" more to openness, and personality than to my appearance, but chemistry certainly helps. Of the other eleven, I introduced several to each other and all in all, after being in two back to back relationships for the prior 20+ years, it was a, "if I only knew then, what I know now," kind of year.
I expect there are long single men who can be described as "players" who have more active 12 month periods (and it helped to reside 50 miles from NYC) but I doubt they would go to the trouble or have the trust to meet women without viewing a photo, and probably are not seeking to be in a relationship, as I was. You need to be an optimist, not cynical, and have the ability to reliably sense sincerity. This eliminates a number of posters I've encountered here.
people who list their gender as "undisclosed"