Exporting slideshow in photos 6 - memory problem

I'm guessing you are using the classic theme. There seems to be a bug in Big Sur that causes this problem.

If you select a different theme, it should work.

I suggest you give feedback to apple, via:

https://www.apple.com/feedback/photos.html

They are more likely to do something if a lot of people state the same.

@jdo_apple, perhaps you can feed this back to the PTB. Multiple people have already given feedback.

Hey there Nhpho,

We'd like to help however we can, but you may need to contact Apple Support and their Photos experts. Let's rule out what we can:

1. As you're dealing with a lot of photos all at once, this could be expected behavior. What occurs if you try exporting a slideshow of say, 20 photos? Please keep us posted on the results.
2. You mentioned running First Aid from Disk Utility, but please confirm if any errors were found/fixed.
3. You also mentioned you've been able to export a slideshow to an m4v file in the past. How big were those files, and how many photos did they include?
4. How much available built-in storage do you have? If it's almost full, here's a link that'll help to clear some storage: How to free up storage space on your Mac
5. If you're using iCloud Photos, how much available iCloud storage do you have? We also would like to provide a link that'll help make room on iCloud: Manage your iCloud storage

We look forward to hearing back from you about these details, and take care.

I'm having the same issue.

My slideshow has 1320 photos, running time of 22:40 with music.

Every time I run the "Export" for the slideshow, it crashes.

I watched Activity Monitor this last time and saw it just continually build up more and more memory usage - until it was using about 50GB in the Swap, and 12GB of my RAM (over 80GB in Physical memory somehow) and then crashed.

I figure if I reduce the runtime to 15 min it should be able to export it all. But, this isn't the first 20+ minute slideshow I've exported. Previously, I was able to do so on a 10-year old iMac running High Sierra.

So, I'm also wondering if there's a memory leak somewhere in the new Photos app and/or a Big Sur problem.

Would appreciate a patch...

But only the Classic Theme and Magazine will play the videos at the full length. And Magazine is cropping the photos badly, so we are stuck between the rocks and a hard place, if we cannot use Classic either and want a slideshow with videos.