This paper presents a method to save energy for mobile systems that perform content-based image retrieval (CBIR). CBIR is a computation-intensive application and a resource-constrained mobile system may save energy by offloading computation to a grid-powered server. We develop three offloading schemes based on different conditions to save energy for CBIR on mobile systems. We implement a CBIR algorithm on an HP iPAQ hw6945 and physically measure the energy savings.