How to preprocess output of $user_picture in Drupal 7? By default user picture output markup looks like this:

&lt;div class="user-picture"&gt;
    &lt;a href="/user/username" class="active"&gt;
        &lt;img class="img-responsive" src="http://www.example.com/sites/example.com/files/styles/profile_page/public/pictures/picture-1-1420552205.jpg?itok=3Kt4fK7H" alt="user avatar username" title="user avatar username" /&gt;
    &lt;/a&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;


I need change markup of user picture output to something like this:

&lt;div class="user-picture"&gt;
    &lt;img src="http://www.example.com/sites/example.com/files/styles/profile_page/public/pictures/picture-1-1420552205.jpg?itok=3Kt4fK7H" alt="" /&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;


Remove unnecessary markup. But question is how?

I have read:

The user-profile.tpl.php file won´t be recognized in my Drupal 7 installation

Changing user picture HTML output on user profile

Will be very appriciate for helping me out.
In the core user module you can find user-picture.tpl.php. Copy this file to your active theme, edit it and be sure to clear cache.

If you need to go deeper, put this in your theme's template.php. Original can be found in user.module.

function yourthemename_preprocess_user_picture(&amp;$variables) {
  $variables['user_picture'] = '';
  if (variable_get('user_pictures', 0)) {
    $account = $variables['account'];
    if (!empty($account-&gt;picture)) {
      // @TODO: Ideally this function would only be passed file objects, but
      // since there's a lot of legacy code that JOINs the {users} table to
      // {node} or {comments} and passes the results into this function if we
      // a numeric value in the picture field we'll assume it's a file id
      // and load it for them. Once we've got user_load_multiple() and
      // comment_load_multiple() functions the user module will be able to load
      // the picture files in mass during the object's load process.
      if (is_numeric($account-&gt;picture)) {
        $account-&gt;picture = file_load($account-&gt;picture);
      }
      if (!empty($account-&gt;picture-&gt;uri)) {
        $filepath = $account-&gt;picture-&gt;uri;
      }
    }
    elseif (variable_get('user_picture_default', '')) {
      $filepath = variable_get('user_picture_default', '');
    }
    if (isset($filepath)) {
      $alt = t("@user's picture", array('@user' =&gt; format_username($account)));
      // If the image does not have a valid Drupal scheme (for eg. HTTP),
      // don't load image styles.
      if (module_exists('image') &amp;&amp; file_valid_uri($filepath) &amp;&amp; $style = variable_get('user_picture_style', '')) {
        $variables['user_picture'] = theme('image_style', array('style_name' =&gt; $style, 'path' =&gt; $filepath, 'alt' =&gt; $alt, 'title' =&gt; $alt));
      }
      else {
        $variables['user_picture'] = theme('image', array('path' =&gt; $filepath, 'alt' =&gt; $alt, 'title' =&gt; $alt));
      }
      if (!empty($account-&gt;uid) &amp;&amp; user_access('access user profiles')) {
        $attributes = array('attributes' =&gt; array('title' =&gt; t('View user profile.')), 'html' =&gt; TRUE);
        $variables['user_picture'] = l($variables['user_picture'], "user/$account-&gt;uid", $attributes);
      }
    }
  }
}