Given a very large multimedia database, how to process k-nearest-neighbor queries efficiently? While the sequential scan is one of the most obvious solutions for small-to-moderate multimedia databases, it becomes practically infeasible when the database size grows. Concomitant with the volume and velocity of data, multimedia databases are frequently endowed with a complex distance-based similarity model that supports content-based data access in an adjustable and adaptive manner. Typical for many state-of-the-art distance-based similarity models is an at least quadratic computation time complexity for a single distance evaluation between two multimedia objects. Thus the search for the most query-like multimedia objects is still one of the major challenges.In this paper, we address the problem of optimal k-nearest-neighbor query processing via multiple lower bound approximations in very large multimedia databases. To this end, we propose the concepts of filter-optimality and refinement-optimality and present the Cascading Multi-Step Algorithm and the Interleaved Multi-Step Algorithm for fast query processing. Besides the algorithms' properties, we study their query processing performance with respect to the number of CPU and I/O operations on large-scale benchmark multimedia databases. Our performance analysis shows how to process k-nearest-neighbor queries in multimedia databases efficiently and provides a guide for further research.