Abstract-This paper illustrates how taking advantage of user studies highlighting the user requirements can lead to the selection of suitable visual features in image search systems. The results of a study to identify pertinent visual features to enhance a text-based press photo search system used by journalists are presented. A requirement was that the visual features should be intuitively understandable by the journalists. This feature selection task is approached by first determining the journalists' photo searching requirements based on a published user study. These requirements are then mapped to suitable visual features. The emphasis was on identifying suitable and intuitive low-level features, as these can be rapidly implemented in the existing text-based image search system. Results demonstrating the use of the selected features are shown.

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