Given that emotion-based computing environment has grown recently, it is necessary to focus on emotional access and use of multimedia resources including images. The purpose of this study aims to identify the visual cues for emotion in images. In order to achieve it, this study selected five basic emotions such as love, happiness, sadness, fear, and anger and interviewed twenty participants to demonstrate the visual cues for emotions. A total of 620 visual cues mentioned by participants were collected from the interview results and coded according to five categories and 18 sub-categories for visual cues. Findings of this study showed that facial expressions, actions / behaviors, and syntactic features were found to be significant in terms of perceiving a specific emotion of the image. An individual emotion from visual cues demonstrated distinctive characteristics. The emotion of love showed a higher relation with visual cues such as actions and behaviors, and the happy emotion is substantially related to facial expressions. In addition, the sad emotion was found to be perceived primarily through actions and behaviors and the fear emotion is perceived considerably through facial expressions. The anger emotion is highly related to syntactic features such as lines, shapes, and sizes. Findings of this study implicated that emotional indexing could be effective when content-based features were considered in combination with concept-based features.