Most traditional and common methods of image retrieval utilize some method of adding metadata such as captioning, keywords, title or descriptions to the images so that retrieval can be performed over the annotation words.
The first microcomputer-based image database retrieval system was developed at MIT, in the 1990s, by Banireddy Prasaad, Amar Gupta, Hoo-min Toong, and Stuart Madnick.
The similarity used for search criteria could be meta tags, color distribution in images, region/shape attributes, etc.
The design is also largely influenced by factors such as the diversity of user-base and expected user traffic for a search system.
Along this dimension, search data can be classified into the following categories: There are evaluation workshops for image retrieval systems aiming to investigate and improve the performance of such systems.