It is useful to have a small set of representative images from a database of thousands of images to summarize its content. There are two key aspects of such image summaries: how to generate them and how to present them. We address both issues. We extend the idea of image saliency to databases and introduce the notion of database saliency. We argue that in image databases, there are certain images that are more uncommon or salient than others and therefore are more interesting. To find such images, we compute their distinctness with respect to the rest of the database. We demonstrate the use of database saliency in two visualization applications: creating image collages and mosaics using automatically chosen salient images.