Importing and Storage Questions

I just purchased the new Black Macbook and am ready to get started. I also got Aperture and CS3. First question regarding importing my photos. Is it true that if you load them on your hard drive, and then import into Aperture (or iPhoto for that matter), it makes a copy of each photo, hence doubling the amount of space taken up on your hard drive? I want to avoid this problem. Should I therefore then load them directly into Aperture, and not directly onto my hard drive? I also have Bridge and I plan to use that. Does that program work the same way?

Also, what is a good free image browser to replace Preview? I really do not like the fact that you cannot scroll through images with previous/next buttons. I know that you can load them all into the Drawer and do it, but that is rather annoying, and I find Preview to be short on features in general.

Thanks for your input!

I do not use aperture, however when I import my images...I import them using Lightroom.

That means I have one copy of the file, the RAW image that is put into the lightroom folder and available in lightroom immediately.

The same files are available in Bridge or any other application as well....so

See if you can use aperture to download into your computer.