@tindell – this is one of several areas where the BuddyPress core API embeds too much markup and presentation, causing a consequent problem for developers.
If you look at my solution on page 1 of this thread, you have the solution for this problem for thumbnails.
As for your note:
Buddypress is great providing you don’t want to change anything expect a few colours
To a large extent that’s true if you are building child themes from bp-default.
You can develop true bespoke sites with BuddyPress, but it’s not a trivial development process – the API could be much cleaner.
