I wrote a pretty nice image upload component a few years ago for Cake 1. I have no clue where the code these days is, but my friend Coa wrote a little later:
http://labs.iamkoa.net/2007/10/23/image-upload-component-cakephp/
http://labs.iamkoa.net/2007/11/06/multiple-image-uploads-into-single-mysql-table-cakephp/
You may be able to hack. It handles loading, resizing (resizing, cropping, resizing, then cropping, max, mix), and if I remember correctly, it can even do filters (flipping, inverse, greyscale).
I also ported the code to the Zend environment (and PEAR file names) for my new content management framework. All of this is now much better (everything I mentioned above is well documented). You can download it here (look at the ImageManipulator class. I think the FileUploader class has a dependency on my String utils class, which you can easily remove if you want to use this.
Otherwise, I say, scan yours. The component architecture in Cake at first confused me, so this could be good XP training if you still don't know it. If you do, you can just grab someones loader and convert it into a component for your Cake application.