Info on Search – and how to customize

For an artist page i had to setup a lot of pages with some text and masonry to show a bunch of images.
Not all Images got their own post – but to my own surprise, image titles, captions, descriptions are not part of the search at all.
The images are then not found despite searching for a term that belongs to the attachment.

there was a snippet here on the forum that includes custom post types (cpt) to search. So i thought that might be possible for attachment too.
and here we go ( you can add to the array of post_type your CPT or Products or Event etc. – you had to list all post_types you like to include ):
this to child-theme functions.php:

function attachment_search( $query ) {
	if (	$query->is_search ){
		$query->set( 'post_type', array( 'post', 'page' , 'attachment' ) );
		$query->set( 'post_status', array( 'publish', 'inherit' ) );
	}
	return $query;
}
add_filter( 'pre_get_posts', 'attachment_search' );

on ajax search there will be then a media section:

now. if you like to change the size for the images shown on the attachment page use
again: to child-theme functions.php:

function custom_prepend_attachment( $attachment_content ){      
        // set the attachment image size to 'large' or even avia images-sizes work here f.e. masonry
        $attachment_content = sprintf( '<p class="attachment-image">%s</p>', wp_get_attachment_link(0, 'masonry', false) );  
        // return the attachment content
        return $attachment_content;      
}
add_filter( 'prepend_attachment', 'custom_prepend_attachment' );

next the search results link to the attachment page. – but this isn’t realy informative – so if you like to add f.e. the caption and description to that page use this too in your child-theme functions.php:

function my_attachment_description($caption_text) {
	global $post;
	$a_post = get_post();
	$caption_text .= $a_post->post_excerpt ? ( '<p class="wp-caption-text">'. wptexturize( $a_post->post_excerpt ) . '</p>' ) : '';
	return $caption_text;
}
add_filter('prepend_attachment', 'my_attachment_description');

the rest will be a bit styling ( it is easy now with the classes set above: attachment-image and wp-caption-text )