This document proposes two methods for enhancing content-based face image retrieval: attribute-enhanced sparse coding and attribute-embedded inverted indexing. Attribute-enhanced sparse coding uses human attributes to generate semantic-aware codewords during offline encoding. Attribute-embedded inverted indexing represents human attributes of query images as binary signatures for efficient online retrieval. Experimental results showed these methods reduced quantization error and improved face retrieval accuracy on public datasets, while maintaining scalability.