After experimenting with all sorts of methods to easily transfer photos between my PC and our iPhones, I have found a solution that works well. Google "photo transfer app." You load it on your PC and get it from the App Store for your iPhone. It costs $6.99 per year for the full version. Here is a photo of our iPhones and a PC playing nicely.

I stopped backing up my iPhone photos to the cloud. There are naming conventions and other things that gum up the works, especially if you have more than one device backing up to the same location. Many people are fine with that, so if it floats your boat.......

My desire is to get the photos from the iPhone to my PC external drive where they are incorporated into our photo database (230,0000 images, all keyworded) where we can manipulate them with Lightroom. When we are on a trip we do this every night in the hotel. Evenings are relaxing, I do photos and Ginny works on the trip diary. We drink wine. Life is good.

As far as backing up is concerned, the external drive is backed up to three locations which is done daily. I keep a backup disk in our safety deposit box and swap it out periodically. I use software called ViceVersa Pro. It is excellent. Been using it for about fifteen years.
One of the problems with thousands of photos on your phone is that it takes forever to find stuff. What I keep on the phone is about a dozen documents (passport, insurance cards, etc.), and a selected few family photos. Less than 40 in all. I can do that because all the good ones I have taken are incorporated into the main database. No need to keep them on the phone.

One more point. We don't keep any data on our PC hard drives. We both have a thumb drive where important data is kept and we back those things up every day as well. Having been through hard drive crashes over the years, the importance of keeping data elsewhere is quite obvious.

I ought to do a YouTube video about this stuff.