Archiving your data is a good option as for the file transfer speed. However, if those images are mostly JPEGs, data is already compressed, and you'll end up wasting CPU time compressing data for a final 1 or 2% gain in file size. This is why you may give a try to
tarsince it only packs files together without trying to compress thenthem (unless you ask it to ;-)Another hack that may be worth trying if your network setup allows it is to start a web server on your laptop, then download them from the destination host. This cuts the process from "copy from laptop to external media" + "copy from external media to destination" into a single-step process. I've practiced it many times (between Linux machines) and it works pretty well.
This is detailed here. The main steps are :
On the sender side :
- cd to the directory containing files to share
- start a web server with Python :
- with Python 2 : python -m SimpleHTTPServer port
- with Python 3 : python -m http.server port
On the receiver side, files will be available at http://senderIp:port. You can retrieve files easily with wget -c http://senderIp:port/yourArchiveName