cameraman - 9:28 am on Sep 22, 2008 (gmt 0)

imagecreatefromstring [us3.php.net] doesn't do quite what you think it does:

Create a new image from the image stream in the string

What you want is imagecreatefromgif or jpeg or png. You can use getimagesize() [us3.php.net] to figure out which one to use to create the image.