Hashing offers a desirable and effective solution for efficiently retrieving the nearest neighbors from large-scale data because of its low storage and computation costs. One of the most appealing techniques for hashing learning is matrix factorization. However, most hashing methods focus only on building the mapping relationships between the Euclidean and Hamming spaces and, unfortunately, underestimate the naturally sparse structures of the data. In addition, parameter tuning is always a challenging and head-scratching problem for sparse hashing learning. To address these problems, in this article, we propose a novel hashing method termed adaptively sparse matrix factorization hashing (SMFH), which exploits sparse matrix factorization to explore the parsimonious structures of the data. Moreover, SMFH adopts an orthogonal transformation to minimize the quantization loss while deriving the binary codes. The most distinguished property of SMFH is that it is adaptive and parameter-free, that is, SMFH can automatically generate sparse representations and does not require human involvement to tune the regularization parameters for the sparse models. Empirical studies on four publicly available benchmark data sets show that the proposed method can achieve promising performance and is competitive with a variety of state-of-the-art hashing methods.