Thanks for the reply Caridad.
I did an experiment with solution #1: I created a new custom taxonomy for them, imported my test CSV, but it doesn't work as I expected:
Each of my posts has 10-20 tags (bright, cheerful, etc.) separated by a comma.
Now when I pull down my new Tags field (pulldown menu), it doesn't recognize each word (separated by a comma) as an individual tag, like it used to. It shows each post's string of tags.
(Note: I am not using Types to set this up; I tried but found strange results when I did. So I am using a simple plug-in to add custom post types.)
I'm trying to figure out what might be the easiest way to get this done. My gut says it would be better to go back to using WP's post_tag to manage tags. Then the only question is:
When I use this:
<strong>Tags: </strong>[wpv-post-taxonomy type="post_tag" separator=", " format="link" show="name" order="asc"]<br />
…the tags appear, but are hyperlinked to the wrong URL. How can I troubleshoot that? Or how can I design the syntax so that each tag is linked to the correct syntax that Views expects for tag searches?