1. 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 `tar` since it only packs files together without trying to compress then (unless you ask it to ;-)

2. 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][1]. The main steps are :

On the sender side :

1. cd to the directory containing files to share
2. 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`

 


 [1]: http://doc.callmematthi.eu/network.html#shareFilesPythonHttp