WMPhoto, or Windows Media Photo is a high compression, still image format developed by Microsoft in 2006 as a part of the Windows Media family. According to Microsoft it delivers a better perceptive quality than JPEG (with less visible artefacts) at less than half the file size.
The compression technology used by WMP is "smart" in that it supports both lossy as well as lossless compression since it is possible to process only part of a large picture file to show a smaller version. The new approach to compression as well as colour space and colour conversion offers a lot of flexibility and the transformation process is entirely reversible, as all colour representations are transformed to an internal colour representation.
WMP uses a TIFF like file container to store image data. It supports monochrome, RGB and CMYK, and can include an optional embedded ICC colour profile, to achieve consistent colour representation across multiple devices. An alpha channel may be present and EXIF and XMP metadata formats are supported. Rotating, cropping or downsampling a WMP image can be done without the need to fully decode it and subsequently encode it again. Windows Media Photo images can be recognised by a WDP file extension.