1. Not really. You can use the nodes in the Flow Control category to build loops that dynamically access a directory with the List Files node and process then the data in KNIME. But again, polling is not supported.
2. Yes, images generated with the JFreeChart or R integration can be directly store with the Image/PNG Writer or even translated into a KNIME table which can then be stored using the Table Writer (which is the KNIME internal format).