Aperture doubling up photos in finder

[vinski]

It's got 24g in the aperture library in my photo folder on my hard drive. 24g are also in separate dated folders in the photo folder in the library. I removed (copied of course) the dated folders. The thumbnails were pretty high res but still thumbnails. Metadata said there was no image and a small exclamation point was in the lower corner of the thumbnails.

Since all my pics are 24G and the Aperture library seems to have that much memory used up, wouldnt it seem I could use just the library instead of using the dated folders? Seems silly that if the library had just thumbs that it would only take up some MB not 24GB?

I kept the originals but wanted to make space on my HD so hoping I can just have 1 version on my laptop and backups on external drives...

Cheers