Weeks after unveiling its revamped imaging product, Google Photos, Google started alerting users of its plans to completely shut down the service in favour of the new one. Google+ Photos has been a popular product baked right into the company’s not-so popular social network, Google+. Spinning it off as its own product had been rumoured for quite a long time and it made a lot of sense since it was easily the most used of Google+’s features. While we previously didn’t know when the curtains would finally fall on the stellar product, we finally have a date.
Starting August 1st, Google+ Photos will be no more on the Google+ Android application and the rest of the platforms will follow thereafter.
What happens to your photos and videos that currently have a home on Google+?
They’ll be waiting for you on Google Photos. In case you haven’t made the switch yet, once you do sign up using the same Google account, you’ll immediately have access to your photos and images. It is not immediately clear if they’ll be kept in the same resolution as they were before or if Google will compress them to conform with its Google Photos policy.
The biggest perk of upgrading to Google Photos is the free unlimited photo storage that Google is offering. While there are other plus features like the ability to intelligently group all your related images together, create some stunning collages, Auto-Awesome tweaks and auto-tagging, the algorithms aren’t all that on point but since Photos is a work in progress, we expect it to get better with time.
Read our review of Google Photos here.
