One thing you can do is to determine how much of the picture you can show in the file and resize it. If you put a pic in word it will put it in its full file size but it will scale it down as necessary to fit the picture in the margins. So lets say you post a picture in word & it can only show it at 66%, you can then open up the picture in an editor & resize it down to 66%, save the file (or a copy if you don't want to modify the original), & post the resized picture in word. Since the size of the picture has decreased the file size should be smaller & therefore the size of the word document will be smaller. I don't know if this will translate to a smaller pdf but my guess is that it would. I don't know about free software but MS's office picture manager will allow you to resize a picture. I believe that comes with all versions of office 2003 & 2007 but I don't know about older versions. Nero's picture editor will not only allow you to resize a picture but will also allow you to decrease the DPI which will also decrease the file size.