In the actual cultural and technological situation acting a generic Information Retrieval sounds limiting. In the traditional practice of the IR, each kind of document research is related to search conditions through a textual language, while nowadays a wider criteria of Multimedia Information Retrieval must be considered, a criteria in which each digital document is treated and searched through lexical or metalinguistic elements, more suitable to its own nature. There will be a distinction between the general practice of Multimedia Information Retrieval, an IR method based on  textual information for textual document search, and a Visual Retrieval method, where documents are retrieved on the basis of visual data.