I'm using Wordpress to create a research tool where archival documents are transcribed into a relational database.

Part of this is a transcription interface, a custom page. What I'm trying to do (and struggling to do) is create a way so that when somebody transcribes a document, they can select images (that already exist in the media library of my website) to associate with the page.

Frankly, what I'd like to do is be able to us SQL and wpdb to get a list of images uploaded on a certain date (but only of a certain size), present that list to the transcriber, so they can select one or more images.

I'm only using PHP and HTML in my code- I don't know AJAX and most of the solutions I've seen using AJAX are geared towards plug-in developers anyways (and I'm not sure how to adapt that to a custom page)

Do I use wp_posts to get the list of images or is there another way to do it? There's ~500 images that I want to get in the list.