At present, the task of identifying casting defects, revealing the causes of their formation and ways of elimination is still relevant. To solve these problems, reference books describing various casting defects are used. These atlases are written in different languages and compiled by well-known specialists, but do not cover the whole range of foundry defects, partially complementing each other. The article describes the principles of development of a unified multimedia information retrieval system based on foundry defects atlases.