The technique of image retrieval is widely used in science experiment, military affairs, public security,advertisement, family entertainment, library and so on. The existing algorithms are mostly based on the characteristics of color, texture, shape and space relationship. This paper introduced an image retrieval algorithm, which is based on the matching of weighted EMD(Earth Mover’s Distance) distance and texture distance. EMD distance is the distance between the histograms of two images in HSV(Hue, Saturation, Value) color space, and texture distance is the L1 distance between the texture spectra of two images. The experimental results show that the retrieval rate can be increased obviously by using the proposed algorithm.