Wd external hardrive very slow and not opening photo files anymore

WD External Drives External Drives for PC
1

my wd hard drive is the old model and was originally configured to a windows pc. I now only use a mac, so I am aware it can only be read-only. However, until a couple of weeks ago it worked fine to open fils and copy photos. I have all my travel and family pictures on it, however, yesterday I tried to open it and it crashed my laptop. After several attempts, it did eventually open and very very slowly loaded the files. I can open text documents fine, though they were taking up to 10 minutes to open, but, the photo files won’t open at all. They just show as jpeg files with no image and I can’t copy them either. Can anyone advise how I can either fix the hard drive or rescue all my photos? There will never be enough storage on the laptop to download them all even if it is possible to retrieve them. Can they be retrieved another way, and if this harddrive is broken (it has never been dropped or damged in anyway) can they be transfered directly to a new hardrive.