Where is My Picture stored? What if MySites are off?
MOSS user profiles have a property called Picture, which can store the URL of an image file. When this property is filled in, other MOSS features display the user's picture at useful times: in search results, or on a MySite. But where's the image file stored? It depends on whether MySites are enabled or not.
If MySites are enabled, then the profile editing page provides a "Choose Picture" control that allows you to easily upload a picture to be associated with your profile: just click the control, browse to a picture on your PC, and click Ok. This control uploads the image file, stores it into the Shared Pictures library of your MySite, then copies its URL into the Picture property of your profile.
But what if you haven't created a MySite yet, or if MySites are disabled?
If you haven't created a MySite yet, then chances are you won't be on the profile editing page. The typical path to get to the page where you choose a picture is to go to your MySite first. If you have no MySite, it will be created for you at that time. From there, click the Detail link on MySite to edit your profile information. But it's still possible you could get to this page without going to MySite first. In that case, either MySites are disabled (see next case), or you got here by entering the URL directly. In that case, you'll see an error message in the upload control indicating that you don't have a MySite yet.
If MySites are disabled, you can still browse to http://mysite/Person.aspx to view your My Profile page, then click the Details link to edit your profile data including Picture. This time, the Picture field is still present, but the "Choose Picture" button is gone. In its place is a plain text field, so you can enter the URL of an image file. This means you have to upload the image file to a site you can access, then copy its URL into this field. This is probably not the smoothest experience for most users.
Administrators planning to disable MySites should be aware of this, if they're also planning to allow users to edit their profile. One choice might be to edit the behavior of profile properties via Central Admin to lock the My Picture field against edits, or even hide it completely if desired.
See also
How MySite pages are organized: MySite Pages and Architecture.
To enable/disable MySites: Managing MySite Creation and Usage.
