Elements added tags to numerous photos

[Bobh123us]

I recently upgraded to Elements 2018 from Elements 13. I tag some photos with a tag so I can copy them to my digital picture frame. I also tag some photos to copy to my spouse's digital picture frame. They are not smart tags. I recently did a search on my tag and copied the tagged files to my digital picture frame. There were around 1400 photos. That's around normal. I then searched using my spouse's tag. Many, many photos were retrieved that I am sure were not originally tagged with her tag. It looks like virtually every photo in the entire catalog (15,000 photos) now have the tag for her digital picture frame. I started untagging the ones that should not be tagged for her digital picture frame, but this is a very big, slow task. It appears that Elements added her tag to many photos without any input by me. Now I need to do a lot of work to undo this. I haven't checked other tags to see if they are similarly corrupted.

Any ideas to get back to where I was before this "help" from Elements? How do I keep this from happening again in the future? Thanks.

[MichelBParis]

It appears that Elements added her tag to many photos without any input by me

In my experience, that's never true.

The problem is that the organizer is extremely fast to add a tag to 15 000 pictures.

Just see how long it takes by assigning a test tag to all your pictures.

For my 65 000 items catalog, 15 seconds - 9 seconds to undo.

So it's easy to have more files selected than you are thinking and to apply the same tag.

Deleting a problem tag is immediate, assigning a new one is obviously more problematic.

I would try to find criteria I can combine to narrow down the selection to add the tag.

[Bobh123us]

That was my experience, too, until now. When I copied her tagged photos to her digital picture frame approximately 1 year ago, there were around 1200 photos. Many (probably most) of the photos now tagged for her digital picture frame are photos that predate the last time I copied all of her tagged photos to her digital picture frame. There is little likelihood that in the past year I manually selected these older photos and tagged them for her digital picture frame. That is why I suspect it is something Elements did without my input. If it really is something that I inadvertently did, then Elements should not have permitted such a massive change without some prior notification and confirmation or an ability to undo. Now I am left with removing the tag from all photos and then adding the tag using various searches to try to approximate the previous assignments of the tag.