Indesign swells placed PDF size?

I often spruce up email catalogues and brochures for customers, adding bookmarks and links in Acrobat to make it more user friendly on screen.  Usually it's too much hassle for them to get the original working files, so they supply me the PDF they have already, typically exported by their designer from Indesign using 'Smallest File Size'.  However if I need to add something to it, I place the page in Indesign and re export.
However this makes the file size bigger than it was before.  I'm not talking about a slight increase in size (which I would expect because I'm adding something to it), it's double or more.  On one of them recently I ended up getting the original Indesign files, and I made the same changes to it and exported and it was nice and small again.  Yet the same PDF files when placed in Indesign and exported get a lot larger.
There may be no fix for it but at least if I knew why it happens it would be really nice.

It would depend on your pdf export settings.
I was recently trying to reduce some PDFs to a smaller size. And I decreased the DPI by editing the images in Photoshop. When I saved the the PDF from Acrobat (I edited everything in acrobat in this instance) well I saved it anyway, and it doubled in size, the exact opposite of what I expected.
So I went through all the settings and made sure I turned off most of what I didn't need.
But it depends on what your settings are for making the pdf or even saving over it.
Sometimes doing a Save As will flush out some stuff. But not always.

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