John, I'd commented on that one earlier, though not from the angle of bothering Jeff. If he (perhaps with good reason - I had that debate with him a couple of years back and it was an "agree to dissagree" one - there are good reasons not to go "open"...) chooses to operate that way, I don't see it being "bothering" him - though perhaps others might.
Personally, I see it more a matter of additional hassle if I have to email/ pm material to someone else saying "please can you put that up for me" or "please can you update this information". It's something that I'd rather do myself.
The forums I am responsible for the maintainence to (annexe and folk info) allow a profile without a picture and this do be done themselves. I can't convince myself that we get a higher % of people supplying info to this than Mudcat does with its system - therfore I am doubtful how much this really is a factor.
As for pictures, it's something that was talked about at the Annexe and something I'm still thinking about (months on). I'd like to go user updatable but do worry at ensuring size limits and that what got posted say as a jpeg was a genuine image file - I'm not really sure what games could be played with binary files if we did get someone malicious.