This is a live chronicle of me playing around trying to figure out a way to resize an image, add a border, padding, and dropshadow using PHP. I figured if you could just pass in a url to a web address it could return a modified image without doing some tricky css stuff. Turns out it wasn't all that tricky. Got it done in under a workday. Anyways, the code is at the bottom in case you want to skip the silly images.
This is my first generated image:
This is an existing image run through php:
Awesome.
Here's the exif information: