Thanks for your response, Kathy. I appreciate your taking the time to help.
I did try deleting the tags per your suggestion.
Fortunately, I solved the problem. Unfortunately, it's quite involved and I'm working with 100s of pics.
In case anyone else has the same problem...
Tags won't delete if there's any metadata in the pics causing them to be created. For some stupid reason, it was hanging on to the original image name after editing. I have no idea what the logic was for the way it assigned the unwanted tags. Some, but not all, of them were tags I previously assigned, then changed my mind because my system became too complicated.
First, I moved the file folder to a different directory so it was only showing in computer, not collections--no tags are available in that view. I went through each subfolder, selecting all the photos in each. I deleted the "Caption" &/or IPTC data {both will say, "multiple files selected," that's okay}. Then, I periodically deleted the ImageDB.db file {don't do this with Paintshop still open, you'll lose any tags you added...ooopsss!}, and repeated the previous steps. At various points, I moved the folder back to the original "collections" location, and worked with them sorted by tag to determine which ones were still giving me trouble.
For some other stupid reason, deleting all the metadata doesn't always stick, and, if you have a lot of files, it won't show them all when sorted by tag. So, fixing the issue will probably require several passes. I continued the process until I had the tags the way I wanted them.
The number of photos I'm working with at one time may be a little unusual, but I still don't understand why Corel can't design software that eliminates previous data and makes the current data a priority. The process of eliminating the unwanted tags was unnecessarily tedious and
very time consuming. Maybe some users don't mind sorting through 100s of unwanted tags, but it can't be uncommon for people to rethink their organizational systems.
