Comment 8 for bug 200432

Looked into the PyGTK pixbuf at http://www.pygtk.org/docs/pygtk/class-gdkpixbuf.html

It says:

A gtk.gdk.Pixbuf object contains the data that describes an image using client side resources. By contrast a gtk.gdk.Pixmap uses server side resources to hold image data. Manipulating the image data in a gtk.gdk.Pixmap may involve round trip transfers between a client and a server in X11 while manipulating image data in a gtk.gdk.Pixbuf involves only client side operations. Therefore using gtk.gdk.Pixbuf objects may be more efficient than using gtk.gdk.Pixmap objects if a lot of image manipulation is necessary.

Translation:
There's also a Pixmap which may be useful, however it's supposedly slower than the pixbuf, which won't help our case. I'll look into it though.