Photos crashing

I am using photos on a Mac Mini. I want to take photos from the photos app and use them in iMovie. You cannot drag-and-drop directly and so I usually transfer from photos to a folder on the desktop and from there to wherever I need them. Sometimes this works okay but today I'm having a problem I often experience which is that the mac crashes with the never ending spinning wheel whenever I try to move the photos to the desktop.

All you can do is repeatedly force quit for the Photos app and try again and again in the hope that at some point it stops crashing. this wastes a significant amount of time.

Does anyone have a better fix for this? Many thanks!