Hi, have you looked at the functions like imagecreatefrompng() ? It says:
"imagecreatefrompng -- Create a new image from file or URL
Description
resource imagecreatefrompng ( string filename )
imagecreatefrompng() returns an image identifier representing the image obtained from the given filename.
imagecreatefrompng() returns an empty string on failure."
http://se2.php.net/manual/en/functio...atefrompng.php