Yahoo! has been taking a ton of heat from the old skool members of flickr with the announcement of their “new and improved” changes which include limiting tags and contacts (nice improvements, huh?). Speculation has been flying back and forth about why they did what they did, and what it all means.

Valleywag seems to be under the impression that these changes were made because there’s an impending move to ditch Yahoo! Photos.

Time to upgrade this from rumor to unannounced fact — that’s our bet, anyway. “Consolidation” was the word seized upon most in Yahoo exec Brad Garlinghouse’s “Peanut Butter Manifesto.” And consolidating the duplicate services provided by post-acquisition Flickr and Yahoo Photos makes sense. Flickr founder Stewart Butterfield denied there would be any merging, but that doesn’t rule out “consolidation” by way of elimination.

Read the rest here. it’s a plausible theory, although Valleywag doesn’t provide any actual sources, it’s speculation that seems to be educated based on the past and their current course of action. It’ll be interesting to see which way this one shakes out because if this is true, expect an influx of awful photos, a pile of swiped photos from other sites, and other garbage that flickr has managed to stay remarkably free of all this time.

Thomas Hawk is also not 100% sure this is going to happen…

First, Yahoo’s been taking a pretty painful beating from their “old skool” members in the past few weeks over their (in my opinion bad) decision to force “old skool” Flickr users to merge into Yahoo. For some “old skool” users this is no big deal — emphatically, no big deal — but there are many other “old skool” members who are very upset about this to the point of canceling their flickr service.

From a timing perspective, it would seem off to now try to push another surely controversial decision with the current “old skool” users.

Even if Flickr wanted to do this, probably better to wait later into the year when hopefully more of the bitterness over this recent change blows over.

Second, Yahoo Photos and Flickr are two totally different places, with totally different communities. Flickr is an edgier place where the focus on social sharing of fine art photography is extremely important. I’m just not sure that a merged Yahoo Photos Flickr does anything at all to enhance or make Flickr a more interesting place.

Only time will tell… It’ll be interesting to see if this is something the Peanut Butter company has coming or if it’s something we’re just being overly paranoid about.

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