updating the code between the comment lines to the code I mention below makes that the data is been written to a 'json' file. Not very clever code yet as the data gets overwritten every time you run the script but that is a separate issue.

    #-------v this does work --------#
    my $filename = "testme.json";
    my $json = -e $filename ? read_file $filename : '{}';
    my $data = from_json $json;

    $data = \@photos;
    write_file $filename, to_json($data);
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