Or that photo conveys awareness of how it all works and it's a fake filter. Having a bookshelf behind you doesn't mean that you've read it and vice versa. Same for shots in a bar, which may happen one time in few months or years even. Photos do not speak, unfortunately.

I know a girl who travels often. When we occasionally spoke about India and pictures she took there, her comments were like "I've seen this and that". It was ok, but I couldn't get rid of a feeling that I know an order of magnitude more about India from a basic (well, a more like a good hist-pop) history channel alone. It was boring and un-deep at the level of scrolling google images.

It's in their best interest to put up a photo that portrays them honestly. If they haven't read any of those books, it'll be immediately obvious, and they've wasted their own time. If they never do shots in a bar, but put up a photo of the one time they did that, it still tells me something about what they think is special and how they see themselves.

It's not perfect. It's not meant to be. It's a heuristic that still leaves plenty of people to talk to for the second pass, and that lets me spend enough brain power to present myself well while we decide if we should meet in person.