fia gallery and photospace don't work

Short of the long is that i’m making a (yet another?) Average Bear blog for my home page- WP3 is doing prety good got a nice theme called animelite that with just a few tweaks to the logo is nice and dandy. BUT: Something isn’t playing (literally and figuritively) with something else what i’m groping for are plugins that:
1) Can let myself and others(when they get there) pick a “avatar” to post under-if this isn’t a wordpressy thing that’s cool.
2)but Idealy i’d like a gallery or mechanic such that pictures/images homebrewd and googled that’ll show pictures/images in a gallery type of presentation. By that I meen a native(built in) mechanism to have a thumbnail such that then a biger picture is displayed. Did a bit staring long and hard at the FIAgaillery and photospace documentation and for the life of me can’t find out how to get them to show my test image someplace tride urls to there content and categories. No luck.

The Average Bear asks: is there a mechanic and or plugin that’ll be fun and easy to get pictures/images to show up from a link in to a gallery system?