Starting a batch and adding files

Quick answer

Go to Bulk Replace → Add New Batch, give it a label, and you land on the Upload step of that batch with nothing else to fill in.

A batch needs a label and nothing more. The post type and the field come later, on the Match step, so you can put the files in before you have decided where they go.

Adding files

Drag files onto the drop zone, or click it to browse. Uploads run one file at a time in the background with a real progress bar, so a large batch will not hit your server's upload limits the way a single multi-file submission would. Each file gets a row the moment its upload finishes, which means you can watch the list build rather than waiting for the whole set.

Files go into a staging folder under your uploads directory. They are not in your Media Library and nothing on your site points at them yet.

Uploading a large batch another way

If you already have the files on the server — copied over FTP, SFTP or a mapped drive — put them straight into the staging folder and use Pick Up Files instead. For a few hundred files a real filesystem copy is faster and more reliable than a browser upload, and the result is identical: the same rows, in the same batch.

What happens to duplicate names

If you upload two files with the same name, the second is stored as its own file with a number appended — report-1.pdf — and that is the name the batch uses from then on. It has to be: the reviewer spreadsheet matches rows by filename, so two rows sharing one name would send one reviewer's decision to the wrong row and silently drop the other. The rename is reported in the upload log.

What is accepted

PDF, DOC and DOCX by default. The extension is checked, and so are the contents — a .pdf that is really something else is refused rather than staged. If you need other types, a site can widen the list with a filter, and the contents check still applies.