Content based image retrieval (CBIR) provides efficient way to retrieve the images from the databases. The feature extraction and similar attribute measures are the key factors for retrieval performance. We need efficient way to access the visual content from large database. Content based image retrieval (CBIR) provides the solution for efficient retrieval of images from large image database. In this work hybrid feature based CBIR system is proposed with comparison of various distance measures. Spatial features like color histogram, color auto-correlogram, color moments, HSV histogram features and Frequency domain features like Semantic image features Gabor wavelet mean entropy, amplitude, energy. Wavelet moments like mean and the standard deviation of the transform coefficients, Shape feature histogram of oriented gradient , Hu moments are used to form the feature vector. The experiments are performed on flower database which consists of 1360 images from 17 different classes. For our experiment we have chosen 3 different classes of flowers of same color consisting of 100 images each. Experimental result shows that the proposed approach performs better in terms of precision, recall, accuracy of classifier and similarity measures .Shape feature play an prominent role for images with same color, texture. We made the comparison of efficiency of different similarity measures like Mahalanobis , Euclidean, Correlation, Spearman, City block(Manhattan) distances approaches on different images based on color, texture, shape features and found which distance measure is best based on performance.