Scan for lost attachments: $lost is lost

[afercia]

in Media Library > Unattached > Scan for lost attachments
press the button, nothing happens.
There have been so many changes to upload.php and class-wp-media-list-table.php and now, even if the $lost query finds something, there's a redirect and $lost is null after the redirect.
Moreover, looks like there's nothing left in the code to actually display lost attachments.
I'm not sure there's still a real use case for this scan, I had to manually edit the DB to have a media file attached to a no longer existing posts since wp_delete_post() "Points all attachments to the deleted post up one level".
See #10911 for some background.

[SergeyBiryukov]

Wow. Broken 4 years ago in [15491] (see #14579). Was altered in [15642], but never fixed.

29169.patch​ seems to work for me.

[afercia]

hi Sergey, thx very much.
For me, it doesn't work. It gets the query arg and that's ok but then wp_edit_attachments_query() returns 0 posts because $q['detached'] is still set.

When detached is set, wp_edit_attachments_query() sets 'post_parent' to 0 so it excludes my lost attachment which has a post_parent > 0.
If I'm not wrong, scan for lost attachment was intended for media attached to no longer existing posts but with (for any reasons) post_parent > 0 which is different from "Unattached" media that normally have post_parent = 0.
Adding to your patch unset( $q['detached'] ); together with $q['post__in'], then it works but I'm not 100% sure, there may be better ways.

[azaozz]

If I remember right "Scan for lost attachments" was added as a "way out" for users to recover gallery posts deleted before version 2.5 (or maybe earlier). If it hasn't been working for 4 years and nobody noticed, maybe it's time to retire it :)

[helen]

I agree, let's kill it.

[ocean90]

29169.3.patch​ removes the non-functional feature.

[helen]

Looks good to me.

[ocean90]

In 29550:

Media: Remove scan for lost attachments.

This hasn't been worked for 4 years.

fixes #29169.

[nacin]

Wow. Well then. :)