In this paper, we present our participation in the ImageCLEF 2005 ad-hoc track. First, we describe a preliminary pool of cross-language experiments with the ImageCLEF 2004 testbed performed in order to evaluate the impact of different-size dictionaries using three distinct approaches. These differences are not remarkable, however recognizing named entities and launching structured queries over the metadata improve the results in all cases. Then, we decided to refine our named entities recognizer and repeat the three approaches with the 2005 topics, achieving the best result among all cross-language European Spanish→English runs. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.3 [Information Storage and Retrieval]: H.3.1 Content Analysis and Indexing; H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval; H.3.7 Digital Libraries General Terms structured queries Keywords image retrieval, cross-language information retrieval, named entities recognition