Problems downloading photos from iPhone/iCloud

I have an iPhone 12. Photos that I take are automatically uploaded to iCloud.

I have a PC running Windows 10 Pro. I need to download regularly all the photos that I have taken on my iPhone to my Windows PC.

As far as I can tell, I can do this either by:

• Downloading them individually (Pictures>iCloud Photos>Photos), then double-clicking on each photo individually. This is laborious.

• Going to my iCloud account, navigating to the Photos section, selecting all the photos that I wish to download, and then downloading into a Zip file on my PC.

So far, so good.

But I have two problems/questions:

Problem 1: I lose information. When I download the photos, using either of the methods above, I lose the information about the date and time the original photo was taken, as the downloaded photos show only the download date and time.

Problem 2: I seem to lose detail: When I download the photograph from iCloud, the image size is smaller than I would expect. As an example:

• A photo that I download (using either of the methods above) appears in my Windows Explorer directory as a JPEG file (e.g. IMG_1234.JPEG) with size 925KB

• If, alternatively, I email a version of the same photo to myself directly from my iPhone, I am asked what size of image I want. If I request “Actual Size” I get a JPG file (e.g. IMG_1234.JPG) with size 2,876KB

Everything I read indicates that iPhone12 photos will be somewhere in the region of 3MB each, so it seems that the full size image is on my phone, but a smaller image is on iCloud.

Two questions:

Question 1: How can I retain the date and time that the photo was taken when I download it?

Question 2: How can I download full-size (or actual size) photos to my Windows PC?

I have searched your published information but cannot find the answers I need. Help!

Thanks for your help