Apple Photos Storage between Devices (iCloud)

I’m tired of paying a monthly fee for iCloud storage for all my photos on my iPhone (I have ~350GB of photos), so I am trying to setup an external HDD connected to my MacBook. The aim is to obviously to store all my photos on my own drive so I don’t have to use iCloud as storage, but to also maintain the “Apple data” such as time and date for each photo that can be lost when exporting the photos to Windows devices. To move all my photos from iCloud to the drive, I’ve got an External HDD formatted to Apple File System (APFS) and have moved my photos library directive on my MacBook to the external drive. Then on my MacBook, I’ve gone Photos>Settings>iCloud and ticked “iCloud Photos” and “Download Originals to this Mac”, that way I have all the photos downloaded onto the external HDD (otherwise only some of the photos were downloaded). Now my question is what is the easiest process to transfer new photos from my iPhone to the External HDD going forward? I’m not sure if iCloud will sync my photos to my MacBook for me without needing to store them in iCloud. Other options would be to plug my phone directly into my MacBook and transfer them over or to use Airdrop