Possible to Download Creative Cloud Photos to External Hard Drive?

There are two ways of doing that:

1. Start LrClassic and create a new empty catalog (it should do that automatically the very first time you use Classic after installing it). Before doing anything else, open the Preferences>Lightroom Sync tab, and in there change the default location for the downloaded Lightroom Synced images to be on the external hard drive (create a top level folder first using Finder (Mac) or File Explorer (Windows), then select that folder when setting the new download location). Optionally, also choose one of the standard Lightroom dated-folder schemes for the folder structure. When you've done that, simply enable the catalog to sync (don't start syncing until you've set those preferences), then all the images in the cloud will start downloading into Classic automatically (yes, full copies of the original files). That's the simplest method, but it has a downside in that not all the metadata that you may have added in Lightroom will sync to Classic....edits are fine, as are Titles, Captions, Copyright info. But Keywords, Location Data, and any face recognition data do NOT sync. Any Albums created in Lightroom will appear as Collections in Classic.

2. The alternative method, which should preserve ALL edits and Metadata added in Lightroom, would be to export all the images in the cloud using the "Original" setting and then import the exported files into the new Classic catalog. A couple of downsides to this method....the album membership data is not retained in the exported files, so you'd have to rebuild the collection structure manually in Classic, and if you export all in one go you end up with all the exported files in a single folder. The latter problem is easy to get round when you do the subsequent import into Classic, as you can choose a Move import operation while setting a dated folder structure in the Destination panel.