Hey,
If the USB connector fits then it's compatible.
The transfer speed however will drop down to whatever the bottleneck is. If the laptop is USB2 then your transfer speed is at best likely about 32MBps.
That really doesn't matter for transferring pictures. If they were say 10MB each (very good quality) then that's about three per second or almost 200 in a minute.
OTHER:
Note that some devices have a USB3.1 Type-C connector which is not compatible directly (without adapter).
OTHER:
You may want to consider making a compressed, backup IMAGE of your Windows partition as well. I prefer Acronis True Image. If the SSD/HDD in your laptop fails then you can buy a new one (or replace under warranty), then restore the backup as of the date you made the image. Also helps if you get really bad malware infection or data corruption.
OTHER:
I have a USB HDD attached to a computer and mirror a folder using a free program called "SyncbackSE FREE". If you want the pictures on the laptop AND as backup on the HDD which I highly recommend (or they're gone if the USB drive fails) then consider that as a somewhat automated solution.
You can set a reminder to plug in your HDD using Calendar software, then when you do that if you set things up correctly SyncbackSE should just auto backup the pictures.
(be careful with MIRROR vs BACKUP as to when and how things get deleted... for example, you don't want to accidentally delete the pictures on the laptop then have the software decide to mirror that by deleting the USB pictures. One way to solve this is to NOT ALLOW deletion of files on the target drive. You can go in and handle that manually or whatever.)