New to Aperture: library advice?

One reason why I wanted to get Aperture was in hopes of no longer having a complex folder system for my images, which number over 10,000 and range from small JPGs to large RAW files. Therefore, I simply want to organize and display images in Aperture by keywords, not folders etc.

However, as I'm reading the Aperture help, I'm seeing all this stuff about projects, albums, and folders. Is it possible to simply have all my images appear in Aperture, in one main library, without any kind of sorting structure other than by keyword?

I guess what I'm really wondering is if this idea is practical; I'm concerned Aperture will bog down with such a massive amount of images being displayed, but maybe this won't be the case.

If this idea is practical, do I set up one library and import all my images into it, i.e. how do I set this up? By the way, I want to refer to my "masters" in another location, not actually import them into the Aperture library.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

I'm still running Aperture 2 (I assume you have 3), but I imagine the folder structure is exactly the same.

Do you have your copy yet? If so, just jump in with a few test images and play around. I haven't started with a fresh copy of Aperture in a while, so I forget exactly what your options are fresh out of the gate, but I'm pretty sure you can just import all of your images into one folder or project (no real difference, for your purposes).

There's a viewing mode that does let you see all of your photos, which you can then organize by keyword. As far as I can tell, this sounds like pretty much what you're looking for.

Sorry about the slightly rambling post...

Actually, your reply helped. I just needed to know that my idea wasn't far-fetched after all! I read up some more, imported my first folder of images with general keywords into one project called Main to get a feel for things, and kept importing into that one project since this didn't seem to be bogging anything down.

I spent time today starting to apply more specific keywords and will add a few folders/albums here and there as I see fit. But at least I got the inspiration to get started from something as simple as your post!