referenced images vs. images?

[Lars Brehmer]

How is this supposed to work?

I have a stack with a lot of images, about 500 megs worth. Opening   
and saving the standalone is very slow, so I redid the entire stack  
and imported the same images as referenced images from a separate  
folder instead of simply importing them into the stack. I thought that  
the stack size would drop from 550 megs to 50 megs by having  
referenced images outside of the stack, but it doesn't - it stays the  
same size and is just as slow. Also, when saving the standalone, there  
seems to be no way to include the folder that contains the referenced  
images, and in the standalone there is just a grey rectangle where the  
images are supposed to be, obviously because the wasn't included in  
the standalone.

What am I doing wrong? Have I misunderstood the concept of referenced  
images completely? I found no answers in the Rev docs and am a little  
bit frustrated!

Cheers,

Lars