In this recent post to the Ajaxray blog Anis Ahmad shows how to use the PHP Thumbnailer class inside of a Zend Framework application.

In the huge set of library, Zend Framework have no options for manipulating image. There is a proposal for Zend_Image which aimed to provides easier image manipulation using GD. But the proposal was not considered. [...] So, what to do when we need to make image thumbnail, resizeing or cropping image etc in Zend Framework?

He shows how to integrate the Thumbnailer class with the Framework - making it a library and implementing it within a controller (a private function called _createThumbnail).