A spatial-spectral metric learning (SSML) framework for hyperspectral image (HSI) classification is proposed. SSML learns a metric by considering both the spectral characteristics and spatial features represented as the mean of neighboring pixels. It first performs the local pixel neighborhood preserving embedding (LPNPE) to reduce the dimensionality of HSI and meanwhile to preserve the spatial local similarity structure. Then, it learns a spectral and spatial distance metric, separately. Finally, the combination of the spectral and spatial metrics yields a joint spatial-spectral metric. It is followed by a nearest neighbor (NN) classifier for HSI classification. SSML shows good performance over the spectral and spatial NN and SVM on the benchmark hyperspectral data set of Indian Pines.