WebP

No — use WebP as a delivery or derivative format. It's excellent for web-facing previews and thumbnails and does carry EXIF/XMP/ICC, but it lacks TIFF's multi-decade archival track record and institutional endorsement, so keep the original camera file or a TIFF master in the archive tier.

WebP carries metadata as chunks inside its RIFF container, similarly to how JPEG embeds EXIF — but WebP adds a single ICC profile chunk and full XMP alongside EXIF, and still lacks a native IPTC chunk type, unlike JPEG or TIFF. Support for reading and writing these chunks varies by tool: utilities like cwebp and webpmux typically preserve EXIF and XMP from a source JPEG, but many web-optimization pipelines strip metadata by default to save bytes.

Wide — Chrome 32+ (2014), Firefox 65+ (2019), Safari 16+ (2022), and Edge all support WebP natively today, together covering roughly 96–97% of global browser traffic, close to a safe default for web delivery. The exception is legacy browsers: Internet Explorer never added WebP support in any version, which used to force sites onto fallback strategies — serving JPEG or PNG via the HTML picture element or Accept-header content negotiation — though IE's now-negligible usage share has largely erased that need.

Many aggressive web-optimization pipelines and CDNs strip EXIF/XMP/ICC chunks by default to save bytes, since bandwidth reduction was WebP's entire reason for existing. A DAM that needs rights or attribution metadata to survive must explicitly configure export pipelines to retain those chunks.

Three encodings inside a RIFF container: VP8 for lossy compression, VP8L for lossless compression with optional transparency, and the extended VP8X container whenever alpha, animation, or metadata is present.

Google announced WebP on September 30, 2010, building it on VP8 video-codec technology acquired earlier that year through its purchase of On2 Technologies. The goal was purely a web-performance problem: JPEG, PNG, and GIF were collectively inefficient for the growing volume of images the web was serving, and Google wanted a smaller-footprint format — comparable visual quality at a smaller file size — to cut bandwidth costs for its own properties, particularly Search and Photos, and speed up page loads generally.

Yes — WebP supports full 8-bit alpha transparency in both its lossless and lossy modes, unlike JPEG, which has no alpha channel at all. In lossless files the RGBA data is compressed together via VP8L. In lossy files, the RGB color data is compressed lossily with VP8 while the alpha plane is compressed separately, typically losslessly, inside the extended VP8X container, so transparency edges stay sharp even when the surrounding image is heavily compressed.

A rendition format rather than an ingest master: DAM systems increasingly serve WebP-derived thumbnails and previews automatically to speed up page loads, while retaining the original ingest format as the true master.