Purpose Large amount of data are stored in image format. Image retrieval from bulk databases has become a hot research topic. An alternative method for efficient image retrieval is proposed based on a combination of texture and colour information. The main purpose of this paper is to propose a new content based image retrieval approach using combination of color and texture information in spatial and transform domains jointly. Design/methodology/approach Various methods are provided for image retrieval, which try to extract the image contents based on texture, colour and shape. The proposed image retrieval method extracts global and local texture and colour information in two spatial and frequency domains. In this way, image is filtered by Gaussian filter, then co-occurrence matrices are made in different directions and the statistical features are extracted. The purpose of this phase is to extract noise-resistant local textures. Then the quantised histogram is produced to extract global colour information in the spatial domain. Also, Gabor filter banks are used to extract local texture features in the frequency domain. After concatenating the extracted features and using the normalised Euclidean criterion, retrieval is performed. Findings The performance of the proposed method is evaluated based on the precision, recall and run time measures on the Simplicity database. It is compared with many efficient methods of this field. The comparison results showed that the proposed method provides higher precision than many existing methods. Originality/value The comparison results showed that the proposed method provides higher precision than many existing methods. Rotation invariant, scale invariant and low sensitivity to noise are some advantages of the proposed method. The run time of the proposed method is within the usual time frame of algorithms in this domain, which indicates that the proposed method can be used online.