Many existing image classification algorithms cannot be used for big image data. A new approach was proposed to accelerate big image classification based on MapReduce. The whole image classification process was reconstructed to fit the MapReduce programming model. First, the Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) feature was extracted by MapReduce, then it was converted to sparse vector using sparse coding to get the sparse feature of the image. The MapReduce was also used to distributed training of random forest, and on the basis of it, the big image classification was achieved parallel. The MapReduce based algorithm was evaluated on a Hadoop cluster. The experimental results show that the proposed approach can classify images simultaneously on Hadoop cluster with a good speedup rate.