Image upload best practices

[eluser]bondjp[/eluser]
[quote author="Benito" date="1275876511"]Hi!
Up to #5 I think you are upload, resize and set meta info to DB.
What I dont get is #6-7?! What are you trying to do? It is always a waste of
resources to load an image in its original size then resize it with html. Why in the world
would you want to do that?[/quote]

I don't, i just want to know how to do it without uploading the original image.
I want to show the thumbnails on a search result and a bigger image than the thumbnails on the users profile.
How can i make this work?