I actually experienced this problem myself and it took along time to figure out why the Avatar option was not showing in my profile.php page of my forums.
I checked all the settings in the administration panel for phpbb and they were fine i even triple checked them.
I searched google for an answer and found that many problems users of phpbb are experiencing are down to folder permissions on the avatar folders not being correct, for example user's just got red cross's after they uploaded them to there forums.

This did not help me at all as i was not even given the option for avatar upload on the profile page, it turned out after deep inspection and testing that there is a file called profile_add_body.tpl that is located in the templates\subsilver\ folder that controls this option amongst the others that are displayed.

All's i did was download a fresh copy of phpbb from the authors website and replace this file with the new one and it worked fine after that! , hope this helps someone else instead of pulling your hair out.

Glad that you were able to get it fixed. Who knows why that would of happened the way it did.

Kind-of weird how things work out that way because it happens to me sometimes when doing a script something is missing then I go and download it again and it is there. Crazy...

Seems like I was not the first to bring up this issue, but it seems whatever you did has not fixed the problem as I do not see anyone with avatars here. Maybe there is a chmod setting out of whack?

The problem you are bringing to my attention laptop_freak is due to modifications and tweaks to improve mysql since lol. The problem has previously been fixed although it looks like a tweak i've done since has caused it to spit its dummy out. This will be rectified soon.

Yea, I just figured no one had avatars that's why I didn't say anything...

haha

But glad to hear it is being handled.

I feel happy that you guys are helping everyone.Keep helping each other.I'm not a webmaster So this section make me bore. Anyway I always visiting this section when have time.

The avatar gallery path doesn't need one.
I don't have one on my main site and in fact the explanation text under the option doesn't mention it either.