Just days ahead of the public release of iOS 8 for compatible iPhone, iPad and iPod touch models, Apple appears to have pushed back iCloud Photo Library to a beta feature and removed it from the iOS 8 Golden Master version seeded last week. Apple has also removed any references of iCloud Photo Library from its website. 

Apple had prominently promoted iCloud Photo Library as a feature on its website, but its iCloud preview page now focuses on iCloud Drive, Family Sharing, iTunes, iCloud Photo Sharing, iCloud Keychain, Find My iPhone and a few other features of the cloud-based service. iCloud Photo Library, meanwhile, has completely vanished.

One good possibility for why Apple has delayed iCloud Photo Library is because of the recent massive nude celebrity photos leak that was attributed to a security breach in iCloud. Even though Apple downplayed the incident as a highly targeted attack, the involvement of celebrities still brought a lot of negative light on iCloud.

iCloud Photo Library was a feature that allowed you to store photos taken on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch directly on iCloud, instead of storing them in Camera Roll and taking up the physical storage of the device. All photos stored in iCloud Photo Library counted against your cloud storage plan, such as the free 5 GB that Apple offers by default.

It was also previously reported that SMS Continuity on iOS 8 will be delayed until October. iCloud Photo Library will re-emerge as a beta feature during that same month. SMS Continuity allows you to receive SMS text messages from your iPhone through your Mac or iPad, similar to the current functionality with iMessages.

Absent of two major features, iOS 8 will be publicly released on September 17th as a free software update.

Are you planning to update to iOS 8?