Bloomberg's sources claim that Google wants to spin out Google+ Photos as a separate site, in what could essentially be a competitor of Facebook's Instagram. Google+ has already great photo archiving, sharing and editing tools and users have embraced the features, uploading some 1.5 billion images to Google+ each week.

Bloomberg claims that Google will separate the image sharing element from the rest of Google+ would help to attract people who don't already have a Google+ account.

In Snapseed, Google already has an offline competitor to Instagram. The Android and iPhone app allows users to add filters and effects to existing images or those captured by a smartphone's camera without the need to then upload them to a social network, although it has integration with Google+.

Google did not comment on the report.