Sorry to hear this is happening. Are you still on an Alltel plan with your new VZW phone, or did you change your plan to a VZW Nationwide plan? My guess is either one or two things are going on.
The first may be that your account's features for picture messaging and data didn't update correctly when you switched phones. Only VZW customer care can reset those. Give them a call from a different phone that yours to troubleshoot at 800-922-0204 or *611 from another VZW mobile phone. Make sure you have your phone with you.
The second thing going on has to do with the network integration between Alltel and VZW. The billing conversion completed in all parts of the U.S. in October, but the network integration is ongoing. Usually the message you received to go picture.vzw.com to view an incoming picture message is for subscribers with non camera phones who aren't able to view picture messages on their phones. Why this only happens when you receive a picture message from former Alltel customers who are still using Alltel phones isn't clear to me. But it may have to do with different network elements that aren't communicating correctly to each other. When you upgraded to a VZW phone, certain data features that enable picture messaging that once resided on an Alltel switch now are on a VZW switch. This VZW switch still needs to handoff data with former Alltel switches being used for those customers who haven't upgraded their phones.
Sound complicated enough 
? Sorry, but either way you need to contact VZW technical support and let the experts fix this for you. Hope you post back your resolution here because there are probably others like you wondering the same thing.
