What happened to the old image attachment page? And why didn't WP tell us?

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  musicdoc1 · Member · Sep 19, 2014 at 7:26 am

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  For the past 6 years, until today (18 September 2014), images embedded in pages and posts have always displayed in an attachment page by default. I’m aware that some users evidently weren’t happy with this feature — at wpbeginner.com, for example, an article titled “How to Disable Attachment Pages in WordPress,” provides instructions on how to disable the feature, saying,

  “WordPress by default creates a single page for each attachment that you have on your site. This includes images, audio/video files, pdfs, etc. This functionality is great for photographers, but not so much for the rest of us. Often we get complaints from beginners who accidentally linked their images to the attachment pages, and they don’t like the way it looks.” (link: http://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-disable-image-attachment-pages-in-wordpress/)

  Be that as it may, I’ve always liked my independent images to open up into an attachment page when clicked on. I liked that the image appeared against the site background, with a title on top. If I recall correctly the there was an edit tab below the title. Early on the morning of 18 September I discovered that suddenly that each of the several thousands of embedded images on my site (all except those displayed galleries and slide shows) no longer appear on such attachment pages. Instead each of them now opens up when clicked upon, and presumably when accessed via Google images and other external links, onto an unattractive black background, with no title, and no way to edit the image. What’s this about? And why didn’t WordPress tell us about the change? Did I miss the announcement?

  Thankfully, Images displayed in galleries and slide shows still open up in the old way I’ve described above. They appear on the site’s selected background, and can be edited directly.

  Why the change for images displayed outside of galleries? It appears almost as if WordPress intends to persuade the user not to display images independently in posts or pages, by that I mean to display images outside galleries and slide shows.

  My ideal attachment page for images:
  I would prefer the sidebar to remain visible on an image attachment page, regardless of whether the image is displayed in a gallery, slide show, or independently in a post or page. I think the header, the header tabs, the site background, and the sidebar should all remain visible when you choose to isolate an image from the page or post in which it appears by clicking on it. I think you should be able to edit the image from the attachment page.

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)