Importing from camera to LR when use to Aperture

Does LR store the same picture in the catalog and folder area or is one a virtual instance?
Can I only use the Catalog or only use the Folder approach?
How do I tell Lightroom to delete the photos off my camera after import?

I am a long time Aperture user trying to get up to speed on LR 5 CC but the import into LR is a little confusing.

In Aperture, my workflow was to connect my camera to my iMac, provide a project name (e.g. 2015 04 04 - Easter) and click import. the result was the photo would be placed into Aperture database and I would have a project named "2015 04 04 - Easter". In addition, I would be asked if I wanted to delete the photos, just improved, off my camera.

in summary, the library has folders (i.e. year) and the folders contain projects (i.e. 2015 04 04 - Easter)

In LR, I plug in the camera, I select the camera as the source but destination is gets a little different (from aperture). On my hard drive, I created a folder called "Lightroom photos" which has a sub folder for each year. so upon import, I tell Lightroom to put the folders into "Lightroom Photos/2015/2015 04 04 - Easter". When I want to edit the photos in LR, I navigate through the folders area on left side and life seems good.

Now we go from different to weird

While I am good with the LR folder approach, there is this thing called Catalog which appears to contain the same photos (i.e. from 2015 04 04 - Easter) that I imported into the folder "Lightroom Photos/2015/2015 04 04 - Easter". If I edit a picture in the catalog, those edits appear in the folder area and vice versa.

Hope this was clear and any advice would be appreciated.

Lightroom copies the photos from the source (your memory card) to a destination folder of your choice. I use a structure similar to your's but I don't put an event or project name in the folder name. So today's photos get imported into Lightroom and saved to e:\LRWorking\2015\04-04. I use keywords and collections to organize my images by subject.

The LR catalog is a database. It doesn't contain your images, otherwise it would be HUGE. It simply keeps track of your edits, keywords, etc and refers to the actual image files on your hard drive. It only references these files, it never alters them. If you deleted image files outside of LR and launched LR, you'd still see thumbnails of all your photos but you wouldn't be able any missing images.

Your "Lightroom Photos" folder is shown in LR's Library module's left panel under "Folders". Do your photo management here, not in the operating system. For example, if you need to move some photos to another hard drive, do it in here. LR will move the actual image files to the other drive, but LR will keep track of where they are.

At the very top of the import dialog, you have 4 options: Copy as DNG, Copy, Move, Add. To delete them from your memory card when importing, use the Move option. I don't recommend this though since that memory card serves as a backup. You can just reformat it in camera after you've done a proper backup of your hard drive. I use the Copy option.

The catalog is a database text file. It does not contain photos, only information about them - the photo's location on your hard drive, what edits you will want applied to the Raw data when the time to export a tiff, psd or jpg comes around, what organizational data you have attached to that listing, such as keywords, ranking tags, collection membership, etc. But all this is only compressed text. In addition to the data in the catalog, LR also makes a low resolution preview jpg (in Edit>Catalog Settings>File Handling set the preview size to the option closest to your monitor size) which is used in the Library module and will be constantly updated to preview any edits you do in the Develop module. If you zoom to 1:1 (100%) the Library will also make a high res preview. In Catalog Settings you can set how long LR will keep 1:1 previews (mine is set to "Discard After one Week"). The Develop module itself, however, makes its own on-the-fly preview, using temporary data from the Camera Raw Cache folder.

No, because the photo file is always in a folder and the catalog only references it.

LR doesn't do that. Format your card after you are sure that the photos are safely on a hard drive.

Thanks to both of you as your comments provided great insight.

I understand the purpose of the catalog and continue with my import process.

Since Apple announced the end of sale of Aperture...etc., I have been importing new photos into LR and leaving the 70K images in Aperture until I can figure out the next steps.

I understand Adobe has provided a method for importing a Aperture database into LR, I need to understand what will come over and the ramification of that. For example, originals verses versions (i.e. Aperture terms)

I read an older version of Scott Kelby's book before I started using LR in earnest. You really want to make some organizational decisions before you get so many images into it that changing course is a major pain. I didn't really "get" LR until he explained it.

http://www.amazon.com …ers-Voices/dp/0321934318/