We describe our image processing system used in the ImageCLEF 2008 Photo Retrieval and Visual Concept Detection tasks. Our method consists of image segmentation followed by feature generation over the segments based on color, shape and texture. In the paper we elaborate on the importance of choices in the segmentation procedure with emphasis on edge detection. We also measure the relative importance of the visual features as well as the right choice of the distance function. Finally, given a very large number of parameters in our image processing system, we give a method for parameter optimization by measuring how well the similarity measures separate sample images of the same topic from those of different topics.