Thanks for the good words and for your questions.
With regard to the orphan/bad parent question, it’s true that images attached to a past/page but not actually “used” will show an “orphan” status, which is harmless. The intent of the “where-used” reporting is to identify Media Library items that are obsolete or, well, unused. The where-used reporting was my original motivation for building MLA, by the way.
The “Bad Parent” notation means that the item is attached (i.e., the post_parent database field is not zero), but either the parent ID is for a post or page which has been deleted or the parent ID exists but the attachment is not used as the Featured Image, not inserted in the body of the post/page and is not used in a [gallery] or [mla_gallery] shortcode on that post/page. There are some problems with this field; for example, if you change the “Featured Image” for a post the post_parent doesn’t always get updated. It’s quite possible that there’s some way to use an item that I am not yet searching for. For example, some other plugin that uses the item in a shortcode other than [gallery] or [mla_gallery].
The “Orphan” notation means that the MLA search did not find any post or page which uses the item as a Featured Image, not inserted in the body of the post/page and is not used in a [gallery] or [mla_gallery] shortcode.
If you find an item that has an entry in one or more of the where-used columns but still shows orphan status, let me know. If there’s an item with “bad parent”, but it is actually used in the post/page it is attached to, let me know.
Otherwise, nothing’s wrong. Both of these conditions are harmless; they simply indicate items that could be put to better use or removed from the Media Library.
With regard to your multisite question, I have done some testing of MLA in a multisite environment and as far as I can tell it works fine. If you do find any issues with multisite use, let me know and I’ll address them.
Thanks again for your interest in the plugin.
