Image Data in Memory Creating a pixbuf from image data that is already in memory. The most basic way to create a pixbuf is to wrap an existing pixel buffer with a #GdkPixbuf structure. You can use the gdk_pixbuf_new_from_data() function to do this You need to specify the destroy notification function that will be called when the data buffer needs to be freed; this will happen when a #GdkPixbuf is finalized by the reference counting functions If you have a chunk of static data compiled into your application, you can pass in #NULL as the destroy notification function so that the data will not be freed. The gdk_pixbuf_new() function can be used as a convenience to create a pixbuf with an empty buffer. This is equivalent to allocating a data buffer using malloc() and then wrapping it with gdk_pixbuf_new_from_data(). The gdk_pixbuf_new() function will compute an optimal rowstride so that rendering can be performed with an efficient algorithm. As a special case, you can use the gdk_pixbuf_new_from_xpm_data() function to create a pixbuf from inline XPM image data. You can also copy an existing pixbuf with the gdk_pixbuf_copy() function. This is not the same as just doing a gdk_pixbuf_ref() on the old pixbuf; the copy function will actually duplicate the pixel data in memory and create a new #GdkPixbuf structure for it. gdk_pixbuf_finalize().