A method and an apparatus for multimedia data management are disclosed. The method provides an indexing and retrieval scheme for digital photos with speech annotations based on image-like patterns transformed from the recognized syllable candidates. For annotated spoken content, the recognized n-best syllable candidates are transformed into a sequence of syllable-transformed patterns. Eigen-image analysis is further adopted to extract the significant information to reduce the dimensionality. Vector quantization is applied to quantize the syllable-transformed patterns into feature vectors for indexing. The invention of indexing scheme reduces the dimensionality and noise of data, and achieves better performance of 16.26% for speech annotated photo retrieval.