Although recent studies have shown that unlabeled data are beneficial to boosting the image retrieval performance, very few approaches for image retrieval can learn with labeled and unlabeled data effectively. This paper proposes a novel semi-supervised active learning framework comprising a fusion of semi-supervised learning and support vector machines. We provide theoretical analysis of the active learning framework and present a simple yet effective active learning algorithm for image retrieval. Experiments are conducted on real-world color images to compare with traditional methods. The promising experimental results show that our proposed scheme significantly outperforms the previous approaches.