The median life expectancy following a diagnosis of glioblastoma (GBM) is 15 months. While chemotherapeutics may someday cure GBM by killing the highly dispersive malignant cells, the most important contribution that clinicians can currently offer to improve survival is by maximizing the extent of resection and providing concurrent chemo-radiation, which has become standard. Strides have been made in this area with the advent and implementation of methods of improved intraoperative tumor visualization. One of these techniques, optical fluorescent imaging with targeted molecular imaging agents, allows the surgeon to view fluorescently labeled tumor tissue during surgery with the use of special microscopy – thereby highlighting where to resect, and indicating when tumor-free margins have been obtained. This advantage is especially important at the difficult to observe margins where tumor cells infiltrate normal tissue. Targeted fluorescent agents also may be valuable for identifying tumor versus non-tumor tissue. In this review, we briefly summarize non-targeted fluorescent tumor imaging agents before discussing several novel targeted fluorescent agents being developed for glioma imaging in the context of fluorescent guided surgery or live molecular navigation. Many of these agents are currently undergoing preclinical testing. As the agents become available, however, it is necessary to understand the strengths and weaknesses of each.