The great Google Plus Purge continues at Google. With the launch of the standalone "Google Photos", the Google+ version of Photos isn't needed anymore, so Google has announced it's shutting the service down. A Google+ Help page says that "sometime after August 1" the Google+ Photos app will stop working.
Google Photos (the non "plus" version) launched at Google I/O, and was pitched as a spinoff of the Google+ Photos. Besides a new app and website, it added computer vision search, which would automatically recognise places, people, and objects in photos, allowing the user to pull up "pictures of cars" without any manual tagging. Google+ used to be seen as the social backbone of Google, but after several years of struggling and the departure of the project's leader, Google has slowly been working to de-plussify its ecosystem. Soon the site will be just a social stream.
Not all of the photo functionality of Google+ is going away. Users will still be able to share photos to their stream, and existing shared photos will still be on the site. It's just all of the mass photo storage and viewing features from Auto Backup are going away. It's still easy to share to Google+ from Google Photos via the share button, it's just separate and neutral now.
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