Help with thumbnail-based prev/next navigation

Hi there,

Here’s something I’ve wished to add to a custom theme for my site: A previous/next post link navigation module that pulls thumbnail images from the respective previous/next posts. But I’ve hit a brick wall. I’ve read a ton of thumbnail implementations on WP but none seem to address this particular issue, and I admit that although I have a good understanding of PHP code I’m not whiz enough to figure out how to roll it on my own.

Here are the premises:

– Thumbnail is added to each post as a custom field (with a key value of “thumbnail” for simplicity)
– this should reside on single.php
– Prev/Next links should also include post’s title and date

I’ve looked into previous_image_link()/next_image_link()/previous_posts_link()/next_posts_link() and, while I presume part of the answer is there, I’m at a loss to figure out how to handle them for my purposes. I bet many others have wanted to try this, so any feedback will be helpful not only to me but for anyone else wanting to implement this feature on a theme. Thanks!