At present, the de-facto standard for providing contents in the Internet is the World Wide Web. A technology, which is now emerging on the Web, is Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR). CBIR applies methods and algorithms from computer science to analyse and index images based on their visual content. Mobile agents push the flexibility of distributed systems to their limits since not only computations are dynamically distributed but also the code that performs them. The current commercial applet-based methodologies for accessing image database systems offer limited flexibility, scalability and robustness. In this paper the author proposes a new framework for content-based WWW distributed image retrieval based on Java-based mobile agents. The implementation of the framework shows that its performance is comparable to, and in some cases outperforms, the current approach.