The N9 has the ability to take excellent photos of various sizes and resolutions up to 8 megapixels. It even has built-in white balance adjustments, filter options, as well as exposure and ISO settings which is more than can be said about built-in camera applications on other mobile platforms. There is little to complain about the N9’s photographic credentials. Except when it comes to sharing the photos to the Internet.

The N9 actually has a decent selection of sharing options. Upon opening the menu to share items within the Gallery app, your next step would be to select the photos you wish to share and then tap the Share button at the bottom of the screen. You are then presented with a list of sharing options which include Facebook, Flickr, MMS, email, bluetooth, and NFC. But there’s a couple of things overlooked.

No sharing to Twitter

This is where the first problem appears. Twitter is among the most popular places to share photos yet it’s not available as an option. Sure, Facebook and Flickr are two of the most popular places for photo sharing but Twitter is a widely popular place as well, so why is the option missing?

I’m willing to give the benefit of the doubt and accept that it may have been overlooked or set aside in the need to ship public release versions 1.0 and 1.1 of the N9’s software so I would very much like to see this remedied in the next major release.

The workaround, which is selecting the photo from within the built in Twitter app, while acceptable, does not work very well. There is also no other Twitter app available for the N9 unless you consider the poorly made Twimgo as an option, but I digress.

When selecting the photo attachment option in the tweet composition screen, the photo library that appears takes you to the oldest photos, located on top of the list, which is the reverse of what the actual Gallery app displays. Did somebody at Nokia miss a memo?

This means if you have hundreds of photos in the gallery, you’ll have to scroll, and scroll, and scroll, and scroll, all the way to the bottom to get to your most recent photo before you can share it on Twitter. This is ridiculous.

You are more likely to share on Twitter the most recent photo you took, instead of the oldest, so the image gallery within the Twitter app should immediately show you the latest photos instead.

No image compression options

Bandwidth is a limited resource on mobile connection and sharing images to the internet can be quote a taxing activity depending on the quality of the connection. Given that a large part of the planet doesn’t have stable and unlimited mobile data access, it’s a surprise that the N9 does not offer image compression options.

As it stands, full resolution photos taken by the N9’s camera can yield photos with the size of up to 3 megabytes each. Without web optimized image compression, one photo will take a very long time to upload, not to mention when there are several photos being uploaded.

It is truly a surprise that the N9 was allowed to ship without being able to alter the compression rate of the photos it takes when sharing them online.

When Nokia Music makes sure that the songs it makes available for download to each mobile device is delivered with a bitrate of less than 96kbps, far less than the expected standard of 128kbps quality, simply to speed up the download, it’s a wonder that the company neglected to make the necessary file size adjustment to allow for faster photo uploading. After all, mobile data upload speeds are generally set much slower than download speeds.

Why not take photos at a lower resolution, say 3 megapixels? That would waste the capability of the camera to take better looking photos now wouldn’t it?

It’s entirely possible to take a photo at high resolution, then downsample that to a much lower file size but still maintain much of the depth, sharpness, and quality of the image. Look at sports photos for example, or stock photos online.

Minor but Irritating

Having said that, these are relatively minor issues that probably should have been addressed before the device shipped but since they’re software related, they can be fixed with an upcoming update.

Of course, this would bring up the debate of what features could you ship it without? Since Nokia chose to ship it with Twitter and photo sharing, it really ought to have implemented these options. At least have the image gallery in the Twitter app reflect the actual Gallery app, instead of presenting the reverse.

As for the lack of direct sharing to Twitter, perhaps it’s not as egregious as not having copy/paste function built-in.

One wonders though if Nokia will address these at all, given that it has moved on to Windows Phone. Since the N9 is still a current product and Nokia has a history of strong product support however, it’s probably not too far fetched to expect these changes being brought in.