Photos on Mac is slow in consolidating referenced files

for years I have been working with a referenced library on Photos. I recently decided to consolidate all photos in the Photos Library

Photos consolidated about half the photos very quickly but for the rest of the photos it exhibits the following behavior. It immediately prompts to Find Original and when I choose the folder that contains the photos it will go into "Application not Responding" and show the spinning color wheel. After about 6 minutes the application will respond and will only have consolidated ONE photo.

I have tried this with a selection of 1 photo, 2 photos, 10 photos etc etc. Any number of photos I select to consolidate, Photos will always consolidate ONLY the first photo in the selection and this after 6 minutes of application not responding has elapsed.

I have tried the following things

-repairing the photo library

-moving the photos to a different location (with on the mac hard drive or on an external drive) and pointing to these folders when Photos prompts to "Find Original"

-restarting Photos

-restarting the Mac

I am using a Mac Mini M4 pro running Sequoia 15.3.2 with all apps up to date.

Obviously I cannot consolidate 18k photos one at a time, so looking to see if there is a solution. Photos can obviously find the files to consolidate one at a time so there must be some bug somewhere that does not allow Photos to find multiple files.