With the rapid development of technology of multimedia, the traditional information retrieval techniques based on keywords are not sufficient, content - based image retrieval (CBIR) has been an active research topic. A new content based image retrieval method using the feature analysis of edge extraction and median filtering is proposed. To the defect of median filter reducing the image’s resolution especially on edges, edge detection is applied in order to get the edge values, and then replace the values of edge position of median filtering image with detected edge values. Aim at noise reduction while edge detail preservation. After feature extraction histogram comparison is applied for feature vector calculation and similarity measurement. Experiment results show that this algorithm could preserve the image border details and has a good retrieval ability of image.