Why does my system "run out of application memory"?

Also you can also free up more space on your hard drive by moving files/apps to external drives even for temporarily. I also work with large size video files (hundreds of megs to even gigs each video), always store most of them on external drives. My internal drive is rarely over 30-40% filled giving plenty enough space for apps to handle large processes.

Going back to PC will not solve anything, your issue is not the machine but memory and space allocation.

Hello there cajunalton,

Welcome to Apple Support Communities. We're happy to help with this trouble you're having the iMac. First, try quitting the Adobe Elements app by selecting Command + Q. Once it’s closed, restart your iMac: Go to the Apple menu in the top left corner of your screen > Restart. After restarting, hold down the Shift key, and click on the Adobe Elements app. Once it’s bouncing in the dock you can release the Shift key. This will allow the app to start up by bypassing the saved state the app was in last. Should this issue persist, try booting the iMac in safe mode and opening the app again. The steps for safe mode can be found here:

How to use safe mode on your Mac

If this continues in safe mode, the next step will be to create a new user account and test again. Get the steps for that here:

Set up users, guests, and groups on Mac

Let us know the outcome, and we can go from there.

Feel free to reach back out if you have any questions.

Best regards!

The app you used uses too much storage space/memory. I think you should use another app, not Adobe. You said you only have 100GB available. The app you used uses 128GB. So that's not enough for you using Adobe Elements.

I experienced this too with my Adobe Premiere Rush. It keeps freezing.

cajunalton wrote:

I have a 27" 2017 iMac with 16 GB of RAM and a 256 gb ssd. I have about 100gb of free space after deleting many many applications. I installed adobe products (probably a bad idea) to manage my photos and videos. Specifically, I am using adobe elements. It took 4 months to run the face recognition on 90k photos and now its working on videos. I have 2500 videos and it is on 46. Every day now, I am getting the message that my system has run out of application memory. I suppose there are two possibilities: macOS cannot manage application memory correctly or the adobe application is out of control. I am on Big Sur 11.5.2. I so annoyed that I am considering to switching back to a windows PC. Any ideas?

https://discussions.apple.com/content/attachment/6ba8a1ae-b232-4457-9e99-d0a14892d164