Image processing in PHP is a necessary evil but is needed more often than not in just about every web application. With the various preferences in image processing libraries (think ImageMagick, GraphicsMagick and GD) it is difficult to find a library that provides a unified object oriented interface as well as implementing the general tasks in a simplistic fashion. Imagine is an open source image manipulation library built with PHP 5.3 that implements an object oriented interface to ImageMagick, GraphicsMagick and GD

Mike gives a quick sample script that uses SPL autoloading to pull in the classes as they're needed (with the "imagineLoader" method) and make a basic thumbnail from a PNG file.