How do I safely transfer photos from Samsung 5s to my computers External Hard Drive?

[AC Question]

I have way too many photos on my camera. I want to transfer them to an external hard drive for storage. I would also want to be able to select some to remain on my phone for sharing AFTER I transfer all to the external drive. I'm very basic in my skills, but I'm certainly able to follow directions

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! To plug in an external hard drive to the phone, you'd have to use an OTG cable, and that's usually just for USB flash drives, not hard drives--I'm not sure if the latter will work. If you have access to a computer, then you could plug the hard drive into the computer, and then connect the phone to the computer via USB. Now use Windows Explorer to drag and drop the photos from the phone's storage to the hard drive.

I would also strongly recommend backing up your photos to Google Photos in the cloud. If you choose the High Quality setting (which is essentially up to 16 megapixel photos, with only a small amount of compression), you get unlimited storage. https://support.google.com/photos/answer/6193313?co=GENIE.Platform=Android&hl=en