Changing user picture HTML output on user profile
Hmmm, it sounds like you likely left the following line of code in user-profile-tpl.php:

&lt;?php print render($user_profile); ?&gt;


Remove the above line of code.

The duplicate image will go away. And so will anything else in the profile.

You'll need to add back each individual item that you actually want via the same method you used to add just the pic, but for other fields in the profile:

&lt;?php print $user_profile['user_picture']['#markup'];?&gt;


If you are using the Panels module, this is trivial to do without touching any code or needing to dive into the $user_profile array.