In this paper, we present a retina abnormality classification framework for diabetic retinopathy and age related macular degeneration using content based image retrieval. This is performed in two phases, namely, feature extraction and pattern recognition. In the first phase, image pre-processing and Otsu multi-level thresholding is applied to retina fundus images to extract eleven low level spatial and statistical features. The second phase consists of machine learning based classification with these features using four machine learning classifiers, namely, Naive Bayes classifier, support vector machine, K-nearest neighbour classifier and random forest classifier. It is found that random forest classifier outperforms all the other classifiers for the detection of both bright and dark lesion classes and achieves 94.8% and 95.1% accuracy, respectively with ROC area 0.977 and 0.98, respectively.