Copying images takes sooooo long

[CyrusOz]

I'm not sure why this is but when i want to copy large movies my Imac copies them at a normal rate, but when i copy a few hundred images it's a different story. Even when the images are just standard sized jpegs it can take up to 8-10 hours to copy 40 hundred jpegs..... does anybody know why this is happening?

I just select the images i want to copy and then drag them to the final destination, am I doing it wrong? I forgot to say that i'm copying them to an external back up drive but it doesn't take this long to copy movies... i'm super puzzled, and pissed to be honest.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
CO

 

[CyrusOz]

wow the response has been overwhelming

 

[TraceyS/FL]

1. There is almost no such thing today as "standard sized jpegs", because I'm sure the ones my 6yo DSLR puts out are wayyyy smaller than what is being produced today. How big at the files on average?

2. I despise doing any sort of transfers to my USB2 drives. It takes wayyyy too long over my FW400 drives.

3. How do the megabytes of the videos compare to the pictures?

4. I don't own an iMac nor a mac that is newer than 3-4 years old, therefore my mileage my vary

 

[obsidian1200]

What kind of file/transfer sizes are you working with? Numbers would help a lot more than qualitative terms for finding why the copy rates are different.

Just guessing from here on down, let's assume the movie you're working with is a DVD encoded movie through handbrake using the ATV2 setting, ranging from 1GB to 3GB. Then, since 40 hundred = 4,000 jpegs, we'll assume that each jpeg is 5MB (that's roughly what I get when I take pictures with my camera). Converting the total file size of 4,000 5MB jpegs into GBs, we get roughly 20GB. Simply by looking at the numbers here, it's not too hard to see that batch of pictures will take anywhere from 20x to 7x as long as that single movie file. Unfortunately, I know that copying a 3GB movie file from one drive to another doesn't take an hour, so there's probably more going on.

Unless we get more solid figures for the comparison, that's really the best I can do. There isn't a lot to go off, here. If you want more details, it'd help to provide us with:

1. The file size of the movie
2. The collective file size of the jpegs
3. The to-and-from destinations, and the connections used to transfer the two.

Also, are you trying to copy both items (the movie and jpegs) at once? I've found that doing this will drastically slow down the second copy operation, so that might also explain why you're having issues.

 

[Smacky]

Try zipping the images into a single file, copy it over then unzip them on the external
Let me know if it goes faster