[6] It supports both lossy and lossless compression, and is the preferred image format for Ecma-388 Open XML Paper Specification documents.

[13][14] The ITU-T updated its publication with a corrigendum approved in December 2009,[1] and ISO/IEC issued a new edition with similar corrections on 30 September 2010.

In 2011, they published a technical report describing the workflow architecture for the use of JPEG XR images in applications (ITU-T T.Sup2 | ISO/IEC TR 29199-1).

[21] JPEG XR's design[1][22] is conceptually very similar to JPEG: the source image is optionally converted to a luma-chroma colorspace, the chroma planes are optionally subsampled, each plane is divided into fixed-size blocks, the blocks are transformed into the frequency domain, and the frequency coefficients are quantized and entropy coded.

Major differences include the following: The HD Photo bitstream specification claims that "HD Photo offers image quality comparable to JPEG-2000 with computational and memory performance more closely comparable to JPEG", that it "delivers a lossy compressed image of better perceptive quality than JPEG at less than half the file size", and that "lossless compressed images … are typically 2.5 times smaller than the original uncompressed data".

[45] In April 2013, Microsoft released jxrlib, an open source JPEG XR library under the BSD licence.