Why Do Some of My Photos Have No JSON File?
Not every photo gets a sidecar. Here is which ones miss out and what happens to them.
Google does not write a sidecar for every file, and the gaps follow a pattern.
The video half of a Live Photo often has none, because Google treats the pair as one item. Very old uploads from the earliest days of Google Photos sometimes have none. Files in the Trash folder can be missing theirs. And occasionally an export is simply incomplete in a part that failed to download.
Those photos are not lost. They just have no extra information waiting for them, so whatever is inside the file is all there is.
The app handles them by falling back rather than skipping. It uses the photo's own capture date if it has one, then the date in the filename, which phone cameras almost always include. Anything it still cannot date is listed at the end, so the gaps are visible instead of silent. The first 500 photos are free.