In this paper we propose a content-based image retrieval method that can search large image databases efficiently by color, texture, and shape content. Quantized RGB histograms and the dominant triple (hue, saturation, and value), which are extracted from quantized HSV joint histogram in the local image region, are used for representing global/local color information in the image. Entropy and maximum entry from co-occurrence matrices are used for texture information and edge angle histogram is used for representing shape information. Relevance feedback approach, which has coupled proposed features, is used for obtaining better retrieval accuracy. Simulation results illustrate the above method provides 77.5 percent precision rate without relevance feedback and increased precision rate using relevance feedback for overall queries. We also present a new indexing method that supports fast retrieval in large image databases. Tree structures constructed by k-means algorithm, along with the idea of triangle inequality, eliminate candidate images for similarity calculation between query image and each database image. We find that the proposed method reduces calculation up to average 92.9 percent of the images from direct comparison.