All about JXR files

JXR stands for JPEG XR (JPEG eXtended Range) and is an image format developed by Microsoft under the name Windows Media Photo. It was presented at the WinHEC conference in May 2006, renamed HD Photo in November 2006, and finally adopted as an international standard (ISO/IEC 29199-2 and ITU-T T.832) under the name JPEG XR in 2009.

Its roots date back to 1999, when Microsoft Research developed the Progressive Transform Codec (PTC) as an alternative to JPEG 2000. The compression performance was similar, but the computational effort was significantly lower. JPEG XR was ultimately developed based on this.

Technical features of JPEG XR

JPEG XR supports both lossless and lossy compression, achieving approximately twice the efficiency of classic JPEG. JXR also supports HDR images, alpha channels (for transparency), various colour spaces (RGB, CMYK, greyscale) and embedded metadata. The data is stored in a TIFF-like container.

Typical file extensions are .jxr, .hdp and .WDP. Windows has supported the format since Vista.

Despite its technical advantages, JPEG XR never really caught on. Outside of Windows, support was lacking. Later, WEBP (introduced by Google in 2010) and AVIF virtually completely replaced the format. For maximum compatibility, conversion to JPEG or PNG is recommended.

Last updated on 11. March 2026 by Sören with the experience of more than 127,897,669 converted files since 2013.