How to fetch only media that was already attached to a post/page?

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Situation: my client has this simple gallery built with WP_Query showing the latest media added to the site: 

$cola = new WP_Query(
    array(
    'post_type' => 'attachment',
    'post_status' => 'inherit',
    'posts_per_page' => 15,
    'post_mime_type' => 'image/jpeg',
    'orderby' => 'date'
    ));

that’s working perfect. Except for now we’re using AdRotate and want to display ads on the website, but we don’t want these ads to be added to the query above.

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A simple solution for this would be to only fetch media that is attached to a post/page, since ads never get attached to anything. This would be achievable by using post_parent: array(_of_all_post_ids) – except that we already have about 4k posts now, so this is definitely not a good approach.

Any ideas how to go about that?

Note: my client is not a techie so this is why i’m ruling out using FTP to use the banner folder AdRotate creates on wp-content. For their planned use, the media gallery would be perfect for the ads.

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  1. A similar approach to your post_parent idea is to add a filter to posts_where:

    function bbg_filter_out_non_attachments( $sql ) {
    global $wpdb;

    // Maybe do some conditional logic to decide whether to filter this query, then...
    return $sql . " AND $wpdb->posts.post_parent != 0 ";
}
add_filter( 'posts_where', 'bbg_filter_out_non_attachments' );

    Another technique is to do a manual query for post IDs with no post_parent, and then pass it to post__not_in:

    $ad_ids = $wpdb->get_col( $wpdb->prepare( "SELECT ID FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_parent = 0 AND post_type = 'attachment'" ) );
$query_args['post__not_in'] = $ad_ids;
// etc

    If you don’t like the idea of mucking around directly with SQL, you could also piece something together that adds a piece of postmeta to every item uploaded through the Media Library (instead of on a new post), and then include a meta_query parameter in your WP_Query. Note, however, that this isn’t going to be anywhere near as efficient as simply looking for post_parent (which is data that already exists, and does not require a table join).