Hi, when I first encountered this, I was told( by a Perl/Tk expert) that the Photo object wants base64_encoded data, and the -file=> option, does convert the binary data to base64 internally as it is read from the disk. So I don't think there is anyway around it.

However, if you are willing to switch to Perl/Gtk2, you can load binary data. There may still be a bit of a slowdown though, because the Gtk2 pixbuf wants all images to be 8-bit 'rgb' (+ optional alpha), so the pixbuf loader converts all images to 24bit or 32 bit data. Here is a simple example:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Gtk2 '-init';
use GD;
use GD::Text::Align;

my $time= localtime;
my $image = new GD::Image(200,30);
my $black = $image->colorAllocate(0,0,0);
my $white = $image->colorAllocate(255,255,255);
my $text = new GD::Text::Align( $image,
         font => gdLargeFont,
#         font => './arial.ttf',
         text => $time,
         color =>  $white,
         valign => "center",
         halign => "center",
);

# the order of these two lines is important
$image->filledRectangle( 15, 15, 150, 150, $black );
$text->draw(100,15);

my $gdimage;
open( IMAGE, ">",\$gdimage) || die "$!\n";
binmode( IMAGE );
print IMAGE $image->png();
close IMAGE;

#gtk2 stuff
my $mw = Gtk2::Window->new;

my $vp = Gtk2::Viewport->new(undef, undef);
$mw->add($vp);

&load_image;

$mw->signal_connect('destroy', sub { Gtk2->main_quit });
Gtk2->main;

###########################################################
sub load_image {

  my $loader = Gtk2::Gdk::PixbufLoader->new;
  $loader->write ($gdimage);
  $loader->close;

  my $pixbuf = $loader->get_pixbuf;
  my $image = Gtk2::Image->new_from_pixbuf ($pixbuf);

#  my $pb = $image->get_pixbuf;
#  my ($x, $y) = ($pb->get_width, $pb->get_height);
#  $mw->set_title("dim ${x}x${y}");

  $vp->add($image);
  $mw->show_all();
}
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