As the number of digital images available to users is exponentially growing due to the rapid development of digital technology, content-based image retrieval (CBIR) has been one of the most active research areas. A variety of image retrieval methods have been proposed, where, given an input query image, the images that are similar to the input are retrieved from an image database based on low-level features such as colors and textures. However, most of the existing retrieval methods did not consider the case when an input query image is a part of a whole image in the database due to the high complexity involved in partial matching. In this paper, we present an efficient method for partial image matching by using the histogram distribution relationships between query image and whole image. The proposed approach consists of two steps: the first step prunes the search space and the second step performs block-based retrieval using partial image matching to rank images in candidate set. The experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed algorithm after assuming that the response tune of the system is very high while retrieving only by using partial image matching without Pruning the search space.