Failing HardDrive - Advice on best method to back up items ... read on

my macbook pro hardrive mid 2012 may be failing. of course the external hard drive i used as back up failed the First Aid disk utility.

Goal: Save all photos and a few documents from macbook pro into new external hard drive. i want to wipe and erase macbook to start all over.

not knowing a thing about it i have all of my files saved under icloud drive .

Question: What’s the best method of saving my photos to a new hard drive? Are the photos and movies that appear in my iphoto/ photos and imovie apps appear in a specific place and i can copy and paste?

Im a bit confused about icloud drive - in that if i erase my macbook disks, will it delete all of my files on drive?