My export, book, or tribute video is taking a long time

Try this first

1. Leave the page and make tea. Exports, book PDFs, and tribute videos are built on our machines, not in your browser — closing the tab doesn't cancel anything.
2. Come back later and check the same place you started it from; the finished file appears there when it's ready.
3. Don't start the same export repeatedly while one is running — you'll just queue up duplicates behind the first.

What's going on

A full export contains your originals — every photo at full resolution, every video exactly as uploaded — and a family archive's originals can add up to a lot of gigabytes. Packaging that honestly takes a while. Books are laid out and rendered as print-ready PDFs, and tribute videos are actually assembled frame by frame; both are real rendering jobs, not instant downloads.

The slow version is the good version: an export that took an hour contains everything, unrecompressed, in the open documented format that will still open in thirty years.

If that didn't work

If a job seems stuck after several hours — no file, no progress — write to [email protected] and tell us which archive and what you were making. We'll check the job directly.