How Many Photos Can I Load Into a Stack

[Luke23132375plpp]

How many files can I load into a stack in Photoshop? I have about 3400 images taken that I wanted to make into a time lapse, is there a way to do that? When I attempt to load them into a stack, it goes for about 30 minutes then the window where it showed the images that were being loaded just disappears. (Adobe Photoshop 2022 23.1.1)

[Bob_Hallam · Accepted solution]

This most likely is a hardware issue.  To make this work go quickly, you will need about 10x scratch disk space than the combined files you are trying to stack.  Also will need a large amount of ram if you're aligning those layers.  

Stacks that are very pixel heavy can take hours to process on computers that are not purpose-built to handle this type of heavy lifting.   I have done this with smaller stacks of hundreds of very high-res images on my Mac Book Pro and the larger ones were completed overnight.  For that project, running them at the end of each day allowed me to complete the project.