effective way of doing preview images

I'm doing a preview images for a online store that sells pdfs.

The functionality we are aiming for is: That when customers browse the store, the catalogue of pdf templates will be visible as tiny scaled images. Additionally, Customers can 开发者_开发知识库click on the template and a image will pop up of the customized pdf (ie fields filled in with customer appropriate content).

The pdf software I've found for PHP is fpdf, fpdi to do generation of the customized pdf and imagemagick to do generation of previews.

The thing I'm finding though is that in order for imagemagick to do the generation of images from the customized pdf. The pdf needs to exist for the image to be created on the server directories.

What the design is looking for though is that server side wise, we only want to have the templates and the image creation to not leave files on the server.

Is there any software package that does this or do I just have to do manual memory management? Ie create custom pdf, create imagemagick preview image, delete custom pdf (which needs to be generated again if the customer actually buys it), upload preview image, send link to user (and at some point delete the preview image later... maybe on logout?)