Prior to the GNOME 1.2 platform, the Imlib library was the preferred way of loading and rendering images in GNOME applications. Unfortunately, Imlib has important design limitations that make it hard to write efficient and highly modular applications.

The gdk-pixbuf library was designed as a solution to Imlib's shortcomings. It provides a simple, orthogonal API and convenience functions for the most common operations. In addition, it supports full transparency information for images, or alpha channel. More importantly, it has well-defined semantics for memory management through the use of reference counting; Imlib has an intractably complex memory management mechanism and cache that will make your head spin.