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.

With the death of Google+ Photos, Google will be dropping from three Photo services down to two. Google Photos won't entirely be taking over the duties of Google+ Photos, Picasa Web Albums will be covering some of the functionality, too. Yes that's right, Google's original internet photo service is still alive! Picasa will apparently be serving as the host for pictures shared during Google Hangouts chats. A letter went out to Google Apps administrators tell them to enable Picasa Web if they want to continue sharing photos over hangouts, and we've seen our personal accounts jump back and forth between Picasa and Google+ hosting as well. We guess then you make two of everything (or in this case three of everything) you have lots of options to fall back on when you kill one.

Google+ probably isn't done having features stripped out of it, either—it seems like the next feature on the chopping block seems to be location sharing. According to Android Police, Google Play Services has been getting more and more location dormant location sharing code over the last few updates, which would be a duplication of the Google+ feature. Google+ location sharing is a lot like "Find My Friends" on an iOS device or the old Google Latitude—pick which friends you want to have access to your location, and whenever they want they can look it up.

Location Sharing on Google+ has a lot in common with Google+ Photos—it's a useful, well-implemented feature that, while tangentially related to social, is held back by its association with Google+. Location sharing is really buried in the Google+ app, and has way less users than it ought to, just because most users don't touch the Google+ app.

The Google Play Services version of Location Sharing is getting a few new features, too. Sharing can be set to expire after a certain amount of time, and it will try to detect your current activity, like driving or riding a bike, and share it with your friends.

Google Play Services is just a back end though, it's not really a user interface, so we're not sure where this will show up. It could end up as a whole new stand alone app, something available to developers, or woven through the whole OS. It would be great to see something like "Hey this person is driving" when you want to text a friend.