only pixmaps available?

Busy tonight I know ... Can we use any other image formats other than pixmaps ? I am pretty sure the answer is no but I thought I would ask anyway. I have built a thumbnailer for my app that grabs images from a directory and then convert via ImageMagick & exec() to XPM,s for display, it works fine , just slow is all, I have seen other GTK-python/tcl based apps that have groovy image browsers, & I can't imagine that they are converting from one format to another as quickly as they display, or am I just imagining things? err also wondering again if anyone had any thoughts how I could capture the contents of the windows clipboard (binary data not text) ? Regards, Simon Wheeler