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Odysee app
Google has reportedly purchased an app that will boost its private photo sharing offering.
The company has acquired Odysee, an iOS and Android app that automatically backs up smartphone photos and videos to your home computer. It also specialises in the private sharing of those photos.
Now the Odysee team has joined the Google+ team, and will presumably work to improve the service's own photo and video sharing tools.
Over on the Odysee website, a brief company statement has confirmed this news. "Odysee’s vision was to be the easiest way for everyone to capture unlimited memories and access them everywhere," it reads. "We are very excited to join Google where we'll continue to focus on building amazing products that people love."
The stand-alone Odysee service will continue until February 23, at which point your saved photos and videos will be made available as a downloadable archive.
Meanwhile, the Odysee app has already been removed from the iOS App Store and the Google Play Store.
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So what use might Google have for Odysee? Obviously the option to save full-quality photos and videos onto your computer rather than into the cloud, as well as to instantly share them to a select few people, would be a handy option for the current Google+ Photos service. But it could go beyond that.
As TechCrunch points out, there have been rumours that Google is looking to spin Photos off into its own standalone service, separate from its current home on Google+. Could this be part of a much bigger Photos relaunch for Google?
