An object of this invention is to realize, in a semiconductor defect review apparatus, a function of easily searching for an image similar to a reference image at high speed. To this end, an embodiment of this invention has a function of saving, as text information, pieces of information accompanying an image such as acquisition date and time, an acquisition condition, the result of analyzing a piece of information other than the image, and a user's comment, in association with the image. The embodiment is configured to narrow down similar image candidates by a keyword search using the pieces of accompanying information, calculate similarity of each image to a search reference image on the basis of the features of the image, and output search results in descending order of similarity.