Tags on Index Page Entries?

Site URL: http://www.agorapartners.com/portfolio

I'm in quite the rut, and don't know where to look for solutions...

I'm building out a website for an urban planning firm, and we are trying to have a projects page where each project can be clicked to have it's own page, and most importantly, there are tags below each thumbnail that showcase the type of work (e.g. real estate, programming, development).

Currently using the York template (7.0 Version). I originally had the Margot template and used a Gallery Page to allow me to create tags as well as a tag cloud, but we didn't like how when clicking on each project, each page was like a blog post. That made me switch to York for their index page feature, but now I don't know if there's a way of a) creating tags for each project and b) having a filter / tag cloud at the top of the page. 

Screenshot below of what it currently looks like (our live site is a much older version, working off of a new template now) - I also manually added the project titles and locations into the thumbnail images themselves, as a) I couldn't figure out a way of nicely overlaying the actual hover text and b) wouldn't be able to add the location in the hover text.

Any help would be greatly appreciated! Have tried so many templates, so I don't know if it's a template fixer, special CSS code, or something else...