Multimedia database management has been intensively studied recently due to the rapid growth of multimedia data and the demand of their access over the Internet. The new member of the MPEG (Moving Picture Expert Group) family, called the ”Multimedia Content Description Interface” or MPEG-7 in short, will extend the limited capabilities of proprietary solutions in identifying multimedia contents that exist today. State-of-the-art technologies and systems will be evaluated and merged to specify a standard to describe multimedia contents in such a process. In this review paper, a comprehensive survey of image database management techniques and systems is performed, and the status in the MPEG-7 standardization process is reported. Based on this study, future trends and promising research directions are also predicted.