TJBNovember Loc: Long Island, New York

For Christmas my wife gave me the excellent gift of a new customized Laptop to use for my photography only, to go along with the printer she gave me last year. I have a large number of photos on my Desktop PC and old laptop. I would like to transfer a number of select ones to the new Laptop for printing, what is a suggested medium to use. I could burn discs from both the PC and old Laptop to load on the New laptop. Use the card the card readers on both to reverse the process, unfortunately the PC does not have accessible USB ports to load to a stick while the laptop does so that option is out for the PC. How have my fellow Hogger's accomplish this in the past. All computers are HP, BTW.
Thanks gals and guys.

Morning Star Loc: West coast, North of the 49th N.

Install DropBox (its free for up to 2 GB) on both the old and the new.
Move your photos into DropBox (not all at once, take them in batches) on both the Desktop and old laptop, then open Dropbox on the new laptop and simply move the photos from Dropbox to the folders you want them in.
It's not the fastest system but you don't have to stay and watch it.

Say Cheese Loc: Eastern PA

If you have a non accessible USB port on the back of your desktop just get a USB extension cord to go from the back of the desktop to where you need it. That is how I do it.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

That must be an old PC if it doesn't have USB ports. The iMac was the first computer with a USB port - in 1998. Your HP should have some way to connect an external drive and copy whatever you want onto that.

dsmeltz Loc: Philadelphia

If your laptop has a SSD drive you might want to consider a 1 or 2T external hard drive for your photo storage. I use a LaCie a 2T drive which is under $100.00. They are fast enough to use as storage if your programs are on the SSD.

But a little more detail on your system might help. How large a drive? Is it SSD or HD? How much RAM do you have? Do you have a USB-C or lightning port?

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

The fastest transfer would be to get an Ethernet cable for connecting two PCs together. (Not a standard cable that goes to a router.) and set up privileges for file sharing on each computer. Works great and is faster than USB and MUCH faster than encrypted WiFi. I have such cable hanging off my desktop. (I do have to turn off WiFi on the laptop as it likes to select that route first.)
An alternate would be copying to a large external pocket drive. Slower, but efficient. I have those also.

Peterff Loc: O'er The Hills and Far Away, in Themyscira.

What is the total size ( MB / GB / TB ) of image data you need to transfer? That wil help us advise on best methods.

Burning disks may be easy and efficacious, but are they CD, DVD, or Blu-ray? The quantity of image data would dictate the viability of any method.

We probably need more information to provide better help.

dsmeltz Loc: Philadelphia

Side note: My wife got me a Dell XPS 13 with a 512 SSD 16G RAM for my Birthday and I picked up the LaCie Drive after. I also had a lot of pictures on the desktop.

This "gift" was more about getting me off the desktop so she could use it than anything else.

TJBNovember Loc: Long Island, New York

To answer some questions, I would have to go hunting for the specs on the old Desktop and Laptop. Both are capable of burning DVD's. The desktop is only about 6 years old, roughly the same for the Laptop, however all the desktop USB ports are located on the back, same would go for the Ethernet port and it is one big pain to reach them.
The new Laptop has a 1TB drive with a 512 GB SSD, with 16GB of SDRAM, with an external optical drive DVD burner.
File size should not be a factor as I am confident it will rather small since it will only be select photos for now.

Peterff Loc: O'er The Hills and Far Away, in Themyscira.

The easiest way would be to suck up the pain or get some other sucker to do it, and use an external USB drive. Copy the files to the external drive, transfer them, then use the external drive for backup on the new machine.

Even with DVDs you are maxed out around 4.7 or 8.5 GB. A 4 TB external is not expensive.

dsmeltz Loc: Philadelphia

In that case, the bottle neck is the port speed on the PC. No way of avoiding that in any way that is useful. But, since you need a backup any way, get an external drive (does not have to be portable since it is a backup) transfer the photos to that drive. Next transfer the photos from the backup drive to your 1T drive on the laptop. It will be time consuming, but your first backup is complete and you can add to it as you add photos to your laptop.

Bill_de Loc: US

Since you said some select images, not all, go ahead and burn the DVD. The is unless you plan on printing 1,000 select images.

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via the lens Loc: Northern California, near Yosemite NP

One option would be to move all photos to an external drive that you can use with any computer and that would solve the problem. I keep all images on external drives, nothing on the Mac itself.

dsmeltz Loc: Philadelphia

Even if he only wants to print selected photos, I bet his wife expects him to get his massive photo collection off the desktop at some point (probably sooner than later.) Moving his photos to an external drive is in his future. Might as well get it over with.

Joe Blow

Method 1
If your desktop is connected to a router (if you can access the internet from it) then just connect the new computer to the router with an ethernet cable. Open both computers. On the new computer go into Explorer and look for other computers in your network and find the older computer. Click on it and dig to your photo folder. Then copy & paste to your HDD.

You can use the WIFI, but it would be much slower.

Method 2
What you want is a CROSSOVER ethernet cable. They look the same as a regular ethernet cable you connect to a router with, but the two inside wires are crossed. As in "same thing only different". Usually they will have a tag noting that they are a crossover ethernet cable.

Connect the two computers using the crossover cable and open both. On the new computer go into Explorer and look for other computers in your network and find the older computer. Click on it and dig to your photo folder. Then copy & paste to your HDD.
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Either method is much faster than burning DVDs or using WIFI. The ethernet should copy at 100 MB/s or faster while WIFI will get you <5 MB/s. Burning DVDs will be an all day thing.

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Many of us consider investing in a portable HDD more than worthwhile. It is a good backup and can easily share photos and documents among computers.