Transfer of photos from iPhone XS Max to Windows 10 PC

I have been trying the last few days to transfer all of my photos from my iPhone to my desktop (and there are a LOT over 26,000 photos). I don't upload them to the iCloud as I have experienced issues with this in the past so prefer to keep them local and at the moment I have the capacity to do it - though I want to now delete a lot of these photos.

My phone takes a good 10-15 minutes to connect but eventually will show the internal storage, then the DCIM folder and then when I click in to this there are all of the folders which contain my photos (or where they should be!). I have lots of folders and when I click in to them it shows - 'Folder is empty'. I know this is not the case as the folder would not have been created in the first place. I've turned both devices off and on again. I've made sure there are no updates due and these are all up to date. I've tried the location sharing and reset it but nothing is working.

I've had my phone plugged in to the desktop for nearly 2 hours and the folders are still showing as empty. I'm hoping there is a quick fix, but I seem to always experience issues such as this. Does anyone have any ideas of how I can resolve this - it's driving me crazy!!!