PHP / GD Image Script slight rework

I have a working PHP/GD image script that takes in an image path, local, does resizing and cropping (optional) and outputs to a cache folder. This all works well, except I need the script to also allow me to pass in a full path to an image and do the processing on it. I've worked with and written scripts like this before, but I'm getting caught up somewhere on the permissions or something with the change between using a local file and a file called up via http:// full path. You'll need to be quite familiar with the GD library. BONUS: If we could get this script to tie in w/ our Amazon S3 account it would help a lot. Instead of saving to the imagecache folder it would save to the S3 account. existing script is here: [login to view URL] I did not write this script