Thanks for the additional comments. This is harder than it needs to be because Apple obfuscates everything.

Downloading drivers from MS that I didn't think were working (lost 99 cents doing this, not a biggie), I have read articles and below is where I have ended up. Mostly I had trouble with all this because I assumed an .heic file was an image file like a bmp or jpg or png or other image file. IT'S NOT!!

The .heic file is NOT an image file, it's a "container" file that associates independent files with a single file container. I am not sure how many independent files there are in a .heic container but at least 2: a video file (this is what allows the "live" image feature) and then a .jpg generated by default from the first of the 15 or so frames in the video file.

So the procedure I will do going forward seems to be:

Go through the live images one by one while still on the phone, turn on the edit feature, then of the possible 15 frames provided in the video file, select the best one and then save it as a new image file inside the iPhone. This creates a second jpg for the heic file and stores it adjacent to the default one. Then when all the best frames are saved, I will download all the jpgs including the new ones I created, then delete the default jpgs created by the phone that I don't want. I will save the video files (.mov) also, although there's no real use for them in the future.

Leaving info for anyone else who attempts this. I will decide after going through the creation of the new files whether using the live photo feature to take travel photos is worth the bother, maybe setting the phone to just take jpgs only is smarter.