How to retain actual creation date when copying/moving/transferring photos from iPhone to iMac

Here's what I was trying to do: take the photos I had taken with my iPhone and move them to my iMac. That's all and I just can't understand why it is so difficult to do. I had to ask for Apple help and although we got cut off before we were done, I was able to bring the photos onto my iMac, but not with the correct date. So now, I have to delete them all - and there's a lot of of them - and start over, presuming I can find a way to transfer photos while retaining the true creation date.

I haven't had this problem with other photos that I've copied from other devices to my iMac - they show the correct creation date, although there have been some files with which I've had the same problem. So doesn't that seem to contradict what you've just told me? Or is there something else that I'm missing? Apple has always been in the vanguard of taking care of user needs, so I don't understand why such an obvious problem hasn't been solved.

Are you saying that the app you linked will copy photos without changing the date? Is there a way to transfer photos that doesn't use the Photos app and would that solve the problem?

Although I actually used to tutor on the Mac in a community college computer lab a long time ago, at this point I have to consider myselfI new-ish to the Mac, so your patience with my questions is appreciated and thanks for taking the time to reply.

I found a better way to do this! I used Image Transfer on my iMac. It recognized the iPhone and I was able to select photos on the phone to transfer to a separate file I created on my Mac (not in the Photos app). They've all got the correct date and they're in HEIC format so I haven't lost data/quality!

So the solution is to simply avoid iCloud altogether, as it must be something in the way it transfers photos that doesn't retain proper date in the file system. Or it may just be that Photos is set up to favor the transfer date of photos rather than the actual creation date. It also may be that when I tried to copy the photos to the iMac, the format changed from HEIC to .jpg (as was mentioned here but was unbeknownst to me at the time) and that's when the date problem happened. Perhaps when the HEIC format is retained in transferring the photos, the Finder can read the actual date, whereas it isn't able to do so with files in jpeg format. I certainly have not figured out the ins and outs and whys of this.

But the whys are not immediately an issue just now because the immediate priorities are to double check that this works and to make sure there won't be any surprises as I try to take the photos from the iPhone and move them to the special file I created on my iMac. So far, I've tried Image Transfer with only a select group of photos, but now I need to make sure that I can keep them separate from iCloud so they don't overload the basic allotment of space there. I'm not certain whether iCloud will try to sync any photos or just the ones in the Photos app. And, I'll need to make sure the HEIC files I managed to transfer will stay put on my iMac when I eventually delete them from my iCloud Drive. Any tips on how to do that would be very much appreciated.

Also, I think part of what was complicating my understanding is that I had thought of the iCloud Drive as an actual drive, when in actuality it's a syncing system, right?

Thanks for the reply but before I say anything else please note, as I mentioned above, that I'm really new to the Mac as it now exists although I used to use them years ago. I've only had my phone and iMac since around the beginning of the year, so there are a lot of basics that I'm not familiar with yet.

I'm using somewhat dated equipment because of a limited budget, so upgrading isn't possible as I understand it since I purchased my iMac used and it's fairly old. When I first got the iPhone, I had started out putting all my photos on iCloud and syncing them among devices. But since I take a lot of photos, I've recently realized that's really not the wisest approach for me, and moving all the photos to my iMac, with the exception of only a few that I would leave in iCloud, makes more sense.

Since the photos were already in my iCloud Drive, I moved them from there into the Photos app on my iMac and then tried to move them to a folder that was external to Photos. Is there a better way to do this? It seems like a convoluted process and I would have preferred to just open up my files on the phone, but the phone doesn't show up as a device on my iPhone so apparently that isn't possible. I didn't deliberately change the format of any of the photo files, but perhaps the way I tried to do this resulted in that.

The Mac used to be so user-friendly! (Despite this issue, I still love the Mac and always will.)