Histogram intersection method, that counts the occurrence of color pixels, is one of the easy and simple color image retrieval methods. The method has an appropriate global property but does not contain the knowledge of shape for images. The absence of spatial information makes it difficult to discriminate images of the similar histogram. The application of one-dimensional projection to each image enables to obtain shape or spatial information of image. But in this case there is another problem having different length of the projection vector according to the size of each image. Thus this paper proposes a method that uses relative distances between peaks and their maximum value in the projection vector. In order to verify retrieval performance, the experimental results between the histogram intersection method, the projection only method, and the proposed one are compared and analyzed.