With the development of multimedia technology, the usage of large image database becomes possible and is rapidly increasing. These can be used for the purpose of retrieving files, which works on the mechanism of image search. Different databases are available on different websites like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and Picasa. This paper shows the advantage of content-based image retrieval system, as well as its key technologies. Comparing to the shortcoming, only certain feature are used in the traditional system. This paper presents a review on different techniques of image retrieval techniques which are based on color, texture and shape of images. It also focuses on the feature extraction and representation, several commonly used algorithms and different methods used for matching of images.