git annex get performance issues with rsync

[Adam Spiers]

One of my USB drives just died, so I'm doing a 'git annex get --not
--copies 1' to re-attain data redundancy.  It seems that a new rsync
instance is invoked for each file?  In my case, I have thousands of
photos which are big enough to be worth annexing but still not
individually huge, so it seems that the overhead of each rsync
invocation is significantly impacting throughput.  A quick empirical
test showed in 20 seconds, that 'git annex get' managed to transfer 11
photos, whereas a single (manual) rsync run transferred 33.  Is this
easily fixable?