Best way to move photos from a vacation catalog

We took a vacation so I made a catalog on my MacBook Pro. Over the course of the vacation I filled the catalog with 1,800 or so images from my Fujifilm X-HS2 and iPhone 14. When I got home I made an export catalog, copied it over to a very fast external SSD, and then tried to import that into my permanent catalog on my MacPro. The catalog is on a fast RAID.

The import took over 30 minutes! It took me less than 2 minutes to copy the 105 GB file onto the SSD.

This seems awfully SLOW. Is there a better way?