Comment 6 for bug 1066108

If I may add to this, the picture uploaded to gmail is whatever your account picture is set to. It's not necessarily what you have taken from the webcam, it can be one of the default ones you can pick. I have seen this in the past for a number of people. This is most likely because of integrating some of the services locally to pidgin or empathy. Let me dig around a little more and I will traige this bug appropiately.