Motivated by the recent pioneering advances on nanoscale plasmonics and also nanophotonics technology based on the surface plasmons (SPs), in this work, we give a master equation model in the Lindblad form and investigate the quantum optical properties of single quantum dot (QD) emitter coupled to the SPs of a metallic nanowire. Our main results demonstrate the QD luminescence results of photon emission show three distinctive regimes depending on the distance between QD and metallic nanowire, which elucidates a crossover passing from being metallic dissipative for much smaller emitter–nanowire distances to surface plasmon (SP) emission for larger separations at the vicinity of plasmonic metallic nanowire. Besides, our results also indicate that, for both the resonant case and the detuning case, through measuring QD emitter luminescence spectra and second-order correlation functions, the information about the QD emitter coupling to the SPs of the dissipative metallic nanowire can be extracted. This theoretical study will serve as an introduction to understanding the nanoplasmonic imaging spectroscopy and pave a new way to realize the quantum information devices.