Best way to send multiple images over a mobile API?
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This is kind of a cross-disciplinary question. My technology choices are Python / Django and Android or iOS. If you can address these specifically great, but it's more a question of technique.

I want to return a number of small images (say, 10 at 10k each) over HTTP as a result of an API query. This will be consumed by a mobile app. I could just get return a list of IDs and get the mobile client to fetch each image individually, but I think the numbers are sufficient to warrant thinking about making this more efficient.

So option 1 is just get the client to pull each image individually. This would involve a separate network connection each time and is probably the simplest but worst way of doing it.

Option 1.1 might be to try and get the mobile client to make multiple HTTP requests on the same connection. I'm a bit hazy about that.

Option 2 might be to somehow return a multi-part response. This might be tricky to write a server and client for. Is there pre-existing Python server? How about Android and iOS client libraries?

Option 3 might be to zip the content. Having used the Python zip library myself, this wouldn't be my first choice (IIRC it only operates on 'real' files not file-like objects). 

What's the best way to go?