Media being appended automatically

[amirasyraf]

I'm not quite sure if this is the package behaviour or it's Laravel's, but for some reason Media is getting appended automatically when I'm creating an accessor even though I haven't explicitly included it.

e.g.

protected $appends = ['image_urls'];

public function getImageUrlsAttribute(): array
    {
        $images= $this->getMedia('gallery-images');

        $urls= [];
        foreach ($images as $image) {
            $urls[] = $image->getFullUrl();
        }

        return $urls;
    }

When retrieving the model, this is being returned:

{
    id: 1.
    image_urls: ['url1', 'url2', 'url3', 'url4'],
    media: [Media Object 1, Media Object 2, Media Object 3, Media Object 4]
}

Where is media coming from? I have not explicitly defined in the model to have it included. If I remove image_urls from $appends, media is also not returned. So for some reason, calling the getMedia() somehow appends the Media object when retrieving a model?

I have tried returning a dummy array, i.e. not calling getMedia() and it works as intended. Which kinda confirms my suspicion?

Of course I can explicitly exclude media from being returned by adding it to $hidden attribute, but is this an intended behaviour?