Robust and fast checksum algorithm?

Question

Which checksum algorithm can you recommend in the following use case?

I want to generate checksums of small JPEG files (~8 kB each) to check if the content changed.

Answer 1

If you have many small files, your bottleneck is going to be file I/O and probably not a checksum algorithm.

A list of hash functions (which can be thought of as a checksum) can be found here.

Is there any reason you can't use the filesystem's date modified to determine if a file has changed? That would probably be faster.