Nowadays, the explosive use of mobile phones leads to generate a large number of personal photos. The requirements of effective image retrieval becomes evident. In this paper, we overview image retrieval techniques with special emphasis on different works that consider automatic image annotation as solution to retrieve images in mobile environment. In most automatic image annotation systems, the high-level concepts are generated based, exclusively, on visual analysis or context analysis of the image. Emerging approaches consider that the fusion of content and context analysis is beneficial for automatic image annotation. We focus in this paper on the type of information, visual and contextual, used to generate semantic that describes the image and the new methods that combine both content and context for automatic image annotation.