Reducing the size of a PDF generated from a DOCX template

In our application we are creating a PDF that has typically 3 pages and 8 photos. The PDF is generated from 3 separate DOCx templates each of which are 160 kB. We are pasting less than 1 kB of data into the templates . The size of each photo document is 10 kB. Yet the size of the generated PDF is over 6 Mb.

Is this normal?

Is there any way to compress the PDF? - we have tried shrinking the images but this makes the quality unacceptable without reducing the size of the PDF to any significant extent.

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