Laravel Image thumb

I making a web app where uploaded photos are stored in /app/storage. To show the file I am using a route ex: showphoto/{id} (Paths are stored in DB)

public function showphoto($id){
     $photo = Photo::findOrFail($id);
     return $this->getFile($photo);
}
private function getFile($f){
        if($f->path){
            $file = storage_path().'/'.$f->path.'/'.$f->origin_name;
            if (File::exists($file)) {
                $contents = File::get($file);
                switch($f->ext) {
                    case "gif": $ctype="image/gif"; break;
                    case "png": $ctype="image/png"; break;
                    case "jpeg":
                    case "jpg": $ctype="image/jpeg"; break;
                    case "pdf": $ctype="application/pdf"; break;
                    default:
                }
                $response = Response::make($contents, 200);
                $response->header('Content-Type', $ctype);
                return $response;
            } 
        }
    }

To show image I am using

{{ HTML::image(route('showphoto', $photo->id), $photo->getName(), array('class'=>'img-thumbnail', 'width' => '100', 'height'=>'100')) }}

Question: Some file are more then 2 MB and when I have a list of them they are loading very slowly, So on the list I want to show just a Thumb of the photo. It is possible to create a temporary thumb that will not be stored anywhere? Or it is not a good idea to create a temporary thumb each time I load a page. Thank you in advance.