@Midland Red
You have a few options, a few ways of getting photos onto your computer, any of them will do fine and just find a way you like best suited to how you like to do it:
Download Apple's iCloud for Windows and install it on your PC. Have
Photo Stream turned on (on both the PC and the iPhone). Your photos will be synced to your Windows via iCloud.
Use any of the cloud services like
Dropbox, Microsoft's
OneDrive, or
Adobe Creative Cloud assuming you have subscribed to it, and I'm sure there are many others. Have one of their apps installed on your iPhone, upload photos into a folder on the app. Then when using the PC, just open your browser, go to the same services, log on, find folder, and download.
As someone else suggested and like you said, used email. Although you don't always have to actually send email to yourself, so when you log on using the computer, you open it and download the photos. You could if needed, just start new email, upload photo, but instead of sending, just save as draft. On PC, you access the drafts folder, open "unfinished" email, and copy the photo (assuming it do sometimes work depending on software).
You could use Apple's Lightning cable, plug the iPhone to the PC. Don't need to open iTunes, just open Windows Explorer. But remember to unlock the iPhone. Go to
My Computer and find it, like you would be looking for your camera plugged into the computer. Find the photos and copy them. (That's what I did with iPad.)
That's 4 options, 4 different ways. But actually you are not limited to one choice, you can switch between those different options. Just find out which suits you best.
The way I do it...
1. Usually leave it to Apple's
Photo Stream.
2., But use Dropbox, OneDrive, or Creative Cloud in case I needed "that" photo on my PC right away.
3. In rare cases, sometimes I still use my 1st generation iPad, and would use the USB cable to copy from iPad to hard drive the old fashion way.
