Image Capture vs Photos

That would be better if you don't wish to have them on your devices - but be warned, a copy on one drive only is as good as not having them at all. You should also have two backup copies if you are keeping them locally.

One other thing with iCloud photos - you can choose to optimise the photos on a device and it will drastically reduce the space taken - to only a couple GB.

However, for Image Capture, open the app on your Mac and connect your iPhone. You'll probably have to accept the phone as a trusted device. I've found this step a bit fussy and then had to disconnect the phone and then reconnect.

Then select your photos. Down the bottom of the Image Capture window you will see a destination selector which says Import to: and from here you can select your external drive in the usual way.

Then click on Download and they will copy across. I'd advise doing this in small batches at first. In the process I mentioned above for my family member I had to prepare some additional photos from her camera roll (long story and not relevant here) and I found that Image Capture sometimes choked on a large batch (say, over 200 items). Might have been the really old iPhone though, being a slower device I guess.

All the metadata is preserved by the way so you won't lose this.

Let us know how you go.

You could do it with either, although if Apple's support document for Image Capture is any authority it is designed to drag image files TO a Mac rather than from it, though I've done both. Image Capture shares with Finder a file management role, while Photos acts more like a data base or library.

To export from Photos to a destination - in your example an external disc - select the photos you want to work with and go up to the menu bar and select File > Export Unmodified Original > [select your destination].

And just a small tip if you are exporting photos to send to someone - if you use File > Export > Export 1 Photo (where you have selected 1 photo - the number is the total of your selected group) you will then be asked if you want to include Location Information. This is the GPS location of the place in which the photo was taken. It's sometimes prudent to exclude this information so don't put a tick in the box if you want the location information withheld.

Photos is a photo manager built around a database that offers non-destructive editing. If you don't wan that then don't use it, and just use Image Capture.

It depends. Do you have iCloud photos activated? This is easy to do and won't take too long to upload your photos - although I've just completed uploading about 40,000 items in one of my family member's Photos library and it took a bit more than two days. If you did have this then all your devices could share the same photo collection, and then you could export them from your Mac and keep them in both devices. It's worth considering.

Otherwise you can import your photos from your iPhone to Photos and keep them there, the export to an external drive.

Or maybe you don't want to keep them in the Photos app at all?

What is it you wish to achieve by putting photos on a drive? Do you not want to have them in Photos on your Mac - and iPhones? The action you take really depends on what you want at the end of the process.

Image Capture will see the Live Photos as a pair of a high resolution still frame and a short video clip with the animation. When you import this pair to Photos, you will see it again as a Live Photo.