MacBook Pro M1: 1.5 hr export for 277 DNGs?

rgmcleod wrote: …So, it took 1.5 hours to export 277 unmodified photos from my library (DNGs). MacBook Pro M1. Anybody else seeing this behavior? Seems awfully slow to me.. Photos were taken as RAW

More information would be needed to decide about this. Where did you "Export" these to? Was the Photos Library on your internal drive? Did you export to a folder on your internal drive. If not, have you tried that?

For me, 72 dngs of over 100 MB each took maybe a 15 seconds to export to an external SSD. But doing this transfer would take way longer to export to a flash drive. If this was an external drive, how fast was it? You can find out with the free BlackMagic Disk Speed Test

Is your system volume very full? Have you noticed any memory preasure? If your Mac does not have much RAM and other apps are hogging the memory, exporting several GB of images at once may be problematic.

I have not timed it, but it seems to work better for me to export to a file on my desktop, and then to the external.

BlackMagic Disk Speed Test ?

Mine is about 750 MB/s