Ron Amadeo, covering Google’s I/O conference for Ars Technica:

At its I/O keynote, Google announced that Google Photos is now a standalone product. The service has officially been spun off from Google+ and is being billed as a brand new product, according to Google’s Anil Sabharwal, and Google hopes the revamp will enable it to better take on the likes of Flickr and Facebook Photos. The new service will be available at photos.google.com.

Google Photos looks a lot like Google plus Photos, just without the Google+ part. There is still tons of cloud storage; pictures are still automatically backed up to the cloud, and Auto-Awesome (though it has been renamed to “Assistant”) is still here. That feature still automatically surprises the user by adding funky effects, making panoramas, and creating album slideshows using copies of your pictures.

It looks interesting, no doubt. And in typical Google fashion, the best of all seems to be the pricing:

Google Photos also allows you to backup and store “unlimited, high-quality” photos and videos for free. For images, this means a resolution of up to 16 megapixels (which Sabharwal called “print quality”), and 1080p for videos.

That will have most people covered, but if you’d like to store full resolution images, there is also a $10/month for 1TB plan where Google won’t recompress your files.

I still don’t know if I would trust Google with my entire photo library, but they certainly took a step in the right direction today.