I'm trying to clean up some space on my Apple iCloud. I would like to download the photos from the cloud to my PC and eventually to a flash drive. I have tried several different methods and the files do not download in chronological order. Can anyone point me to a simple tutorial on how to accomplish this process? Even if there is some kind of the script to rename all of the files in bulk using the metadata so that they can reorganize themselves by date would be an acceptable solution, I just don't know how to do it.

I could be completely wrong but I don't think it is a simple process for someone who is not a programmer/coder. I am not for sure.

This has been a struggle for organizing my photo library for years because Apple and Microsoft do not agree on what piece of data should be the definitive timestamp of a photo or video.

Here's what I mean... and I did use AI to organize this a bit better:

When you take a photo with your iPhone on December 25 at 7AM when the kids wake up to open presents, the this is recorded in a field called DateTimeOriginal. This field is defined by the EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format) standard, which is commonly used by cameras, smartphones (including Apple devices), and other imaging devices. It represents the date and time when the photo or video was originally taken or recorded.

When you download files to a Windows PC, the file system may change the file system's created/modified timestamps, which are Windows file metadata, not EXIF. This is why the downloaded media might lose its original capture date and instead show the date they were saved to the PC.

Microsoft supports reading DateTimeOriginal in photos but relies on third-party tools or frameworks to extract metadata from videos.

Video metadata for when and where it was shot/taken gets even murkier - specifically the geolocation, but that may be out of your scope at this point.

That being said you can create a script to name the photos after the timestamp, but it requires learning a tool to manipulate the timestamp called EXIFtool (https://exiftool.org/) and likely learning how to program in the Python language.

A couple of tools I use to manually update filenames and correct bad datestamps are:

Bulk Rename Utility: https://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk/
GeoSetter: https://geosetter.de/en/download-en/
Advanced Renamer: https://www.advancedrenamer.com/

The EXIF data should already exist on each photo. You should be able to add a column header in File Explorer for Date Taken to be able to sort by chronological order.