With the rapidly increasing use of devices that can easily create, store, and share multimedia data such as pictures, videos, and sound, we have now accumulated an enormous amount of multimedia data. While data mining approaches may provide ways to filter and categorize collective data effectively, understanding individual multimedia content can still be tedious and time-consuming: common ways to understand individual multimedia content are to listen to the sound, view images, or playback video and animation. What types of interaction techniques are available for which types of multimedia data, and can any of these techniques be applied across different domains? To answer the first part of this question, in this article, we surveyed over a hundred publications of past and current research on various types of interactive multimedia tools and approaches that assist user interactions with multimedia data and summarized eighty-one prevalent tools. Naturally, such a list of research cannot, of course, be exhaustive, especially given the limit of pages, thus this paper intends to provide an overview of the status of interactive tools for multimedia tasks in the related study areas. We hope that this paper will serve as a hub for researchers of such multimedia tools for finding related and similar tools so that they can leverage the findings and efforts of other researchers to move our knowledge and techniques forward and across typical boundaries of multimedia research domains.