After installing Aperture and leaving photos in iPhoto library, why did iphoto library size almost double?

Question

I installed Aperture and chose to leave all my images in the iPhoto library until I became more comfortable/familiar with Aperture.
I was looking at my hard drive space and see that the available space went way down.  In Finder, the Aperture library.ap library is 17.97 gb and the iPhoto library is 122.75 gb.
When I open iPhoto, it says that it contains 19349 images/87 gb.
What happened?  Is that extra size related to the Aperture referencing the images?  Should I delete and start over, and move all the images into Aperture so that they are managed there?
I'm just figuring my way around Aperture, and I'm trying not to over-think the organizational differences, but this size discrepancy seems a bit too much.

Answer 1

I wish I had more info for this but I'm stumped. As I said there is no reason Aperture would increase the iPhoto library size by importing iPhoto's library.
BTW how did you do the import, that might shed some light on the problem.
The image count between the backup and the live iPhoto libraries seems fairly consistent so why the jump in size I can't say. And as for the increase in the number of images in Aperture, you started with an empty Aperture library, correct? And did you import anything directly into Aperture since you did the iPhoto import?
I'm still a little confused on the whole thing where Aperture shows both original and edited versions of an image, and some show both RAW & JPEG versions of an image,
Well Aperture really doesn't show both the original and edited versions, all you ever see are the versions unless you specifically ask to see the master. When you import an image into Aperture a version of the master is automatically made and displayed. Because at this point the version is no different then the master (you haven't made any adjustments to it yet) the version looks exactly like the master but it is the version you are seeing.
As for the RAW & JPG thing, if you shoot both RAW + JPG's in your camera when you import them you have the choice of which to make the master or to make each one a master. Not sure if that is what you are referring to.
I'm wondering whether I would have been better off just moving the whole iPhoto library into Aperture at the beginning, and deleting the iPhoto library.
That is definitly one option and the option most users who switch eventually make. You're not going to want to have both programs handeling your photos. But you should probably hold off until you;re more omfortable with Aperture and make sure you have a good backup of the iPhoto library before you do anything.
Remember when you import the iPhoto library into Aperture you're only choice is to copy the images not move them. This is done so that you can make sure all went OK before doing anything with iPhoto.
If you have the room you could try bringing in the iPhoto library backup, and trying the import again into a new empty Aperture library.
regards