This paper presents a novel method for image classification based on a hybrid genetic algorithm (GA) and support vector machine (SVM) approach which can significantly improve the classification performance for content-based image retrieval (CBIR). Though SVM has been widely applied to CBIR, it has some problems such as the kernel parameters setting and feature subset selection of SVM which impact the classification accuracy in the learning process. This study aims at simultaneously optimizing the parameters of SVM and feature subset without degrading the classification accuracy of SVM using GA for CBIR. Using the hybrid GA and SVM model, we can classify more images in the database effectively. Experiments were carried out on a large-size database of images and experiment results show that the classification accuracy of conventional SVM may be improved significantly by using the proposed model. We also found that the proposed model outperformed all the other models such as neural network and typical SVM models.