heic to jpeg conversion weird thing going on

I am trying to batch convert iPhone 14 photos to a smaller size to give to people that don't have support for heic monitors. I don't know what I did in the past, but my photos are showing up as a .jpeg in photos on my Mac mini. I think there is some pre conversion going on that I don't know about. I can't use the HEIC converter app now. Even when my pics are jpegs, they are still a little blown out with the .heic codec. I want to run them though a batch in photoshop to don't some correcting and down converting.

Before I do that, how do I get my images to remain as .heic in my photos library? I want to keep that format for the originals before I delete them from the cloud.

P.S. Rather than batch in photoshop, can photos do color correcting, auto: tone, contrast and color: and downsize so I do't have to leave the photos app?

Thanks.