Comment 1 for bug 371363

This is a "can't fix" from the ecryptfs perspective. If you face image is stored in your encrypted home directory, you can't read this data until you've entered your password. This is by design.

GDM could perhaps store your picture some place other than your home directory (like i /var/lib perhaps). However, I suspect others would fairly complain that private data (their image) is being leaked to non-encrypted storage.

Now, if you really want to work around this issue you could:
 1) copy your non-encrypted image to some non-encrypted location, like /var/lib
 2) create a symlink in your non-encrypted home directory to the non-encrypted image.

:-Dustin