As the sizes of multimedia databases grow and grow, the access and insight into such voluminous databases get more and more important. A promising way to explore and query multimedia databases is based on interactive visualizations which allow users to satisfy their information needs in a flexible and intuitive way. In order to perform the visual exploration process efficiently, we highlight three different speed-up approaches on distinct layers: Perceptual pruning in the visualization area, computational pruning in the evaluation of the query process, and data space pruning in the underlying feature space.