1. An image processing system for recognizing a scene within an image comprising: i) a database; ii) an image processing computer operatively coupled to said database and a wide area network, said image processing computer further operatively coupled to an image source computer; iii) a software application running on said image processing computer, said software application adapted to generate an image distance metric from a set of images; iv) said software application further adapted to retrieve an input image; v) said software application further adapted to extract a first set of input image features from said input image, wherein said first set of input image features corresponds to said distance metric; vi) said software application further adapted to extract a set of image features from each image in said set of images, wherein each of said extracted sets of image features corresponds to said distance metric; vii) using the distance metric, said software application further adapted to compute an image feature distance between said first set of input image features and each of said extracted sets of image features; viii) said software application further adapted to select, from said set of images, a subset of images based on said computed image feature distances, said subset of images corresponding to a set of scene types; ix) said software application further adapted to determine a scene type from said set of scene types; and x) said software application further adapted to assign said determined scene type to said input image.