WordPress Attachments vs Post Meta

The WordPress “gallery” functionality partly depends on the attachment of the media to the post via the post_parent column.

Specifying IDs in your shortcode allows you to include images in your
gallery that aren’t necessarily “attached” to your post — that is to
say, not uploaded from within your post or page. This flexibility
allows you to create and embed any number of galleries containing any
number of images!

Note: If you choose to just use the “barebones” version of the
shortcode in your post or page, only images that are
“attached” to that post or page will be displayed.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Gallery_Shortcode

You can see in the source that shortcode uses get_children, which has quite a comment block in the source, and again you can see that post_parent is a key factor.

There are probably other ways to answer the questions but that is the first that comes to my mind.

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