It appears that images on your site were added using a plugin or theme function. While that functionality may have added it to the page or post, it appears (based on your questions above) that the ‘attached to’ function of the default media library inserter was not used to provide the attachment information in those cases.
I am not sure that a featured image is shown as attached or a banner image from a plugin or theme (common specific cases on your site).
Also, an image can be uploaded to the site without using the media library or other function but manually via FTP and then the IMG is manually added in HTML.
Review the method(s) used to include these images and consult the plugin or theme provider that was/is used to see if they have any input.
So, this just adds to the known issues of finding attached images simply in WordPress.
May I ask what the task that you are attempting to accomplish is when trying to find images?
Thanks for the reply. For adding images, I maintain a folder on my computer with the banner-style images (1600×400 px) I use for the featured images on the website. Once an image is properly sized, I save it to my computer folder, and then I use the Add New feature in the media library to add the image to the library from my folder. When adding a featured image to a page, I always select it from the media library. That’s the process I’ve used since I started the website in 2017. So far as I know, I’m not using any plugin or theme features to add images to the media library or insert them on pages.
What I’m trying to accomplish: Over the years my image processing skills have improved. Rather than using the Banner Image Opacity option for making text readable over a banner image, I’ve found that using darker toned images with a higher opacity setting (80-100%) gives me a nicer-looking result (at least in my opinion). If I want to adjust or replace an image, I need to know what pages the image appears on as I’ve used a lot of them on multiple pages.
At first, I thought there should be a simple way to find what pages an image is posted on but after several hours of looking at plugins and reading forums, your comment “this just adds to the known issues of finding attached images simply in WordPress” sums up my findings.
On Monday, I added the plugin “Mediamatic Lite” that let me create a virtual folder structure in the media library to help me better organize my photos and pdf’s.
On Tuesday I added the plugin “Enable Media Replace” which lets you replace an image in the media library and it updates the replacement on all the pages where the image appeared. This seemed to be just what I was looking for. I’ve used it for several images now and it does what it says but I still need to know what pages the original image was posted on to check the change and to adjust the Banner Image Opacity setting which is a big part of what I want to accomplish.
What I’ve ended up doing is creating a spreadsheet with the date, page title, and feature image name for each page. At around 300 pages it took a few hours but was doable. Sorting that by image name shows me the pages I’m looking for. It just seems to me that with a database-driven website, there should be a way to click on an image in the media library and see the locations where the image appears.
