In this paper we propose the CBIR algorithm which is based on a novel image block method that combined both color and edge feature. The main drawback of global histogram representation is dependent of the color without spatial or shape information, a new image block method that divided the image to 8 related blocks which contained more information of the image is utilized to extract image feature. Based on these 8 blocks, histogram equalization and edge detection techniques are also used for image retrieval. The experimental results show that the proposed image block method has better ability of characterizing the image contents than traditional block method and can perform the retrieval system efficiently.