Google Gadgets attracted my interest a few days ago and I started working on a gadget for myself and for a couple of clients. I needed to create a dynamic image by looking it up in a database and adding text to it on the fly. For this, I use a product that I bought a couple of years ago from Chestysoft. They call it csImageFile and it has many tools for manipulating images on the server before displaying them on a web page. You can scale, rotate, brighten, sharpen, draw on them, merge them, add text (any font on the server) and much more. Even though their documentation is quite good, I've asked for help a couple of times via e-mails with Simon Chester the owner. He's been very helpful and I've always gotten the desired results.