I’ll try to give you a couple of ideas of how I like to solve this problem. I’ve tried to find more user-friendly ways to do this than plugging in and downloading. In general, it can be annoying when you are trying to move between IOS and Windows because Apple wants to keep you in their iCloud. I have also found the iTunes program to be getting very difficult to work with. I think they update it every month. To avoid iTunes, there are some third-party programs that enable you to see into iPhone folders from a PC.
The first thing I did was use an app called PhotoSync. It uses geofencing to auto-magically upload your most recent photos onto a networked drive like a NAS. For me this was my drobo or asustor. I used this until it got flaky and I would notice it hadn’t uploaded for a few weeks and needed to be restarted on my phone. I would have kept using it, but didn’t feel like troubleshooting the problems.
Then I moved to a similar app called DroboPix. As you can tell, this is specific to the drobo platform. I think most of the NAS providers have similar programs. Of course these don’t help you if you aren’t running a NAS. (Of course everyone should be running a NAS ;-) )
Also, if you have a NAS or are familiar with networking your PC, you can use the FileBrowser app to select and move images directly. It isn’t the most user friendly, but it does work.
These days I have started using OneDrive, but I have discovered that it can be used smarter. By configuring OneDrive correctly, I can actually send photos directly from my phone into a photo folder on my PC. What I do is go into my album, select the photo or photos, and then send-to OneDrive(just like I would if I were texting it). From there I can select any OneDrive mapped folder to drop the images. I like this best of all the choices I have used so far because I can curate the pics I move over. On my mobile device I take a lot of junk photos (like shots of the SKU of a lightbulb I need from the hardware store.) I don’t really want to upload those. I would imagine you could do the same thing with Dropbox or google docs. I think the key for me was to map the folders so that I can drop the photo directly into the correct folder on my computer. As you might imagine, it doesn’t go there immediately. It is going into the cloud so that it will be actually downloaded the next time I turn my PC back on.