That is an easy one:

It usually starts as a friendship that starts within a group of people online(forum/.../game) so it takes months to start(3 months per say). This means you can get away with no picture/ a picture of your favourite cartoon/your pet...

Then most people are ok with video chatting after they know each other well enough to know that the other person is safe(add another couple of months/at least a month). ie: it took me months to join a hangout with some of the members of this sub

By now you suggest video chatting but they are "having issues" with their cameras and whatnot also you are invested enough to keep going for a few more months.

I started on a forum and got to know a bunch of people years ago(in touch with about 50 of them over fb still, have met a few of them offline, went to the wedding of one of them...). We really got along well as you may imagine, otherwise we would no longer be in touch, for about a year and a half my facebook was cat pictures and nobody called me out on it.

No personal picture whatsoever were there.

Nobody had any issue with this and I was reffered to as a kitten affectionately by people as if this was normal.

I met my ex with this profile that was filled with kitten pictures and had little to no personal pictures(she joined the forum late, facebook wasnt that popular over here at the time...).

There were several months of just bantering openly on groups before she was even told that there were some odd pictures of me here and there around the groups if she searched hard enough(I got brave now and then)...

Im real but I could have easily pretended to be someone else(wedding was way after we broke up so nobody had met me yet)