In this paper we present a novel application (called SmartAlbum) for photo indexing and retrieval that unifies two different image indexing approaches. The system uses two modalities to extract information about a digital photograph; i.e. content-based and speech annotation for image description. The result is a powerful image retrieval tool that has capabilities beyond what current single-mode retrieval systems can offer. We show on a corpus of 1200 images the interest of our approach.