I have searched the forums and cannot seem to find an answer to my question.

I have two referenced libraries both, one from the first half of 2011 and the other from second half of 2011. The library from the first half of 2011 has roughly 56,000 referenced images in it and the library from the second half has 64,000 referenced images in it. However, the library from early 2011 is 125GB (after deleting previews. Prior it was 153GB) and the library from late 2011 is 57GB. I have generated previews to be the same size and quality in both libraries. I have set the previews to be 1920x1920 at quality 8. I cannot figure out how to get both libraries to be around the same size.

The only thing that i can think of is that these libraries used to be one library. I had one library for all of 2011. At the beginning of this year I exported all projects from July to December of 2011. I cannot remember exactly how I did it. I may have exported the projects and then deleted them (preivews only) from the library of origin. I remember reading somewhere that Aperture doesn't delete previews from its database. There was a tutorial on how to delete them from Aperture 1.5, but the the file structure of the database has changed since then. That I said, I'm in the process of rebuilding the database on the library from early 2011. Thus far it has restored 85,000+ versions (from a library that supposedly has only 55,000 images), so I'm thinking it is restoring the versions that I previously deleted. How would I go permanently deleting the previews/versions/images from the second half of 2011 from Aperture, so that the size would decrease.

The only way that I could think of right now is to Export all the projects from the early 2011 library into a new library and then delete the old library altogether. But that could be a pain I would have to recreate and sort the projects into folders. Or would repairing the library have done the trick? Any suggestions?