Thumbnail advice

I’m getting a bit tied in knots with this.
Can anyone offer any advice on the best and simplest solution for the following:

I have an image tv, when I upload an image I want a thumbnail to be automatically created. When the thumbnail is clicked on an enlarged image will be displayed using a lightbox effect.

I’m using directresize at the moment and it’s working ok except it’s creating duplicate .thumb files everywhere and it’s really messy, maybe I haven’t configured it correctly, any ideas? Also it is no longer supported, this is also putting me off.

Any advice much appreciated, I’m getting a bit pushed for time now and getting bogged down with all the different image processing snippets/plugins.

Hopefully someone can point me in the right direction.
Many thanks

I stuck with directresize for this and got it tidied up a bit. I’ll have to check out the other options when I have some more time.

How about using phpthumb and prettyphoto?