The management of images, video, and in general, multi- media data, is an improtant issue in the design of digital libraries. In particular, the following problems stand out: efficient storage, fast retrieval, and protection of intellectual property. We outline below some of the recent advances in image processing in the context of the UCSB Alexandria Digital Library (ADL) project whose goal is to create a database of spatially indexed data. Maps and satelite images are among the main data sets in the project. The focus of this overview is on image retrieval using texture and on digital watermarking. A texture thesaurus for browsing aerial photographs and a wavelet based digital watermarking scheme are presented.