The growing capacity of computers, the abundance of digital cameras, and the increased connectivity of the world all point to large digital multimedia archives. They include images and videos from the World Wide Web, museum objects, flowers, trademarks, and views from everyday life. The faster these archives grow, the more prominent becomes the need for efficient access to the content of the images and videos. In this short course, we will give a survey of the most recent developments on image and video search engines. First, the important step of feature extraction will be discussed in detail including color, shape, and texture information, with particular attention to discriminatory power and invariance. We will then focus on the concepts of indexing and genre classification as an intermediate step to sort the data. We will pay attention to interactive ways to perform browsing and retrieval by means of information visualization and relevance feedback. Methods will be discussed to localize the retrieved objects in their images.