Abstract Cross-modal hashing intends to project data from two modalities into a common hamming space to perform cross-modal retrieval efficiently. Despite satisfactory performance achieved on real applications, existing methods are incapable of effectively preserving semantic structure to maintain interclass relationship and improving discriminability to make intra-class samples aggregated simultaneously, which thus limits the higher retrieval performance. To handle this problem, we propose Equally-Guided Discriminative Hashing (EGDH), which jointly takes into consideration semantic structure and discriminability. Specifically, we discover the connection between semantic structure preserving and discriminative methods. Based on it, we directly encode multi-label annotations that act as high-level semantic features to build a common semantic structure preserving classifier. With the common classifier to guide the learning of different modal hash functions equally, hash codes of samples are intra-class aggregated and inter-class relationship preserving. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of EGDH compared with the state-of-the-arts