Effective and flexible solutions for enabling reduced resource consumption and handling formats heterogeneity are essential in multimedia management systems. The reduction of the resource consumption for indexing can be achieved in two ways: by limiting the multimedia content transfer over the network, and by employing only the most appropriate algorithms, only over the relevant content. Multiple formats are developed for the description of resources, contents and applications, which are not necessary interoperable. A solution for coping with this heterogeneity is to create of an integrative model for the description of any resources. We present in this paper the solution implemented in the context of the LINDO project for indexing multimedia content into a distributed system. Such solution that addresses these two points by reducing as much as possible the resource consumption through (1) a distributed indexing technique that avoids multimedia transfer; (2) a flexible mechanism for selecting the indexing algorithms to be employed on each remote server, according to the multimedia content characteristics, its acquisition context and user queries history. Our proposal is based on generic description models associated to multimedia content, indexing algorithms and servers.