Elements 2021 Organizer keeps crashing while importing. Are HEIC files to blame?

@george.cummings1, my Elements 2021 catalog has about 225k media files, of which about 2,500 are iPhone .heic images.  Since I have plenty of storage space on my computer, I see no value in importing my iPhone files in .heic format.  I have now adopted the practice of using the iPhone options to shoot in HEIF (.heic) format to save space on my phone, but to convert to jpeg when importing to my computer.  I have experienced problems importing files from my iPhone using various different programs.  So I consider it to be an Apple or Microsoft OS issue.  (The problem is particularly acute with video files.)

Here are my iPhone settings for the Camera app>Format:

And here are the Settings for the Photos app:

It's almost a year after this memory leak was reported. I just bought PhotoShop Elements 2021 and now I can't access my photos from the organizer anymore. What a waste of cash.

Does Adobe staff read these forums?

Scott

Same issue, memory presure crashes Win 10s. Such a shame it is not even fixed the latest update .  Adding an insult, it says these HEIC file are not compatible where as some of the HEIC files can be imported. Why would I purchase these software if I cannot import my phone picture. It is one thing it needs to do for a consumer product, work with phone picutres. I am beyond frustrated.

I am experiencing the same issue. There is a massive memory leak in the Photoshop Elements Organizer when importing HEIC files. The graph below is approximately 200 images and 2 minutes into the import and you see it is using 26 GB of memory. The memory usage just keeps going up at the same rate until the organizer crashes. If I import 100 images at a time, then it completes successfully. That is not a realistic option though when I have thousands of images to import.

Go to Settings>Apps and Features and you should see the following listed:

However, Microsoft has just issued a vulnerability warning about HEIF files and have apparently updated the extensions within the past few days.  Take a look at this link.  It may be worth using this opportunity to update the extensions on your machine.  There is a link in the web page for updating the extension.

Are you importing from your iPhone or from your hard drive? 

Do you have the Microsoft HEIF extensions installed?  See this article.