With the proliferation of multimedia data, there is an increasing need to support the indexing and retrieval of high-dimensional image data. Although there have been many efforts, the performance of existing multidimensional indexing methods is not satisfactory in high dimensions. Thus the dimensionality reduction and the approximate solution methods were tried to deal with the so-called dimensionality curse. But these methods are inevitably accompanied by the loss of precision of query results. Therefore, recently, the vector approximation-based methods such as the VA- file and the LPC-file were developed to preserve the precision of query results. However, the performance of the vector approximation-based methods depend largely on the size of the approximation file and they lose the advantages of the multidimensional indexing methods that prune much search space. In this paper, we propose a new index structure called the GC-tree for efficient similarity search in image databases. The GC-tree is based on a special subspace partitioning strategy which is optimized for clustered high-dimensional images. It adaptively partitions the data space based on a density function and dynamically constructs an index structure. The resultant index structure adapts well to the strongly clustered distribution of high-dimensional images.