In visual information retrieval the careful choice of suitable proximity measures is a crucial success factor. The evaluation presented in this paper aims at showing that the distance measures suggested by the MPEG-7 group for the visual descriptors can be beaten by general-purpose measures. Eight visual MPEG-7 descriptors were selected and 38 distance measures implemented. Three media collections were created and assessed, performance indicators developed and more than 22500 tests performed. Additionally, a quantisation model was developed to be able to use predicate-based distance measures on continuous data as well. The evaluation shows that the distance measures recommended in the MPEG-7-standard are among the best but that other measures perform even better. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.3.3 [Information Storage and Retrieval]: Information Search and Retrieval – Information filtering, Query formulation, Retrieval models. General Terms Algorithms, Measurement, Experimenta...