I like the concept of taking photos continuously not to miss any special moments, but I do not like the model of how Narrative provides this service.
1. I am not able to prevent the upload of my photos to the web before I had a chance to censor the photos I don't want to be uploaded. As soon as I installed the application it began uploading the photos to the cloud. I would have liked to have an option to examine the photos locally first, and only then upload a subset to the cloud. I want to be able to censor and remove some photos before they hit the internet. As we all know once on the internet you cannot get the photos back. Any software can have bugs and security breaches and I want control over what gets published.
2. The camera is bigger and more noticeable than I expected. It is 1.4" x 1.4" x 0.25". It is made out of white plastic. I would have liked it to be pretty, so I can wear it as a broche so I would look nice with my outfit, not just like I am wearing an electronic monitoring device. In attached video you can see how I changed the way Narrative looks. My suggestion to Narrative is to make a variety of jackets be available for the camera so people can make it different colors and designs based on what they are wearing.
3. I did not like the manual that came with the camera. It has child-like drawing with very few words on each page. The manual tells you how to wear the camera, but surprising does not tell you what to do to see the images you took. It has no information on what you need to install, how to access your photo, or any other practical information. I had to Google for an answer of what I needed to do. That is an indicator of a badly designed manual.
What you need to do:
♦ Enter start.getnarrative.com into your browser url
♦ You will need to down load software for you PC. The download is 35.4 megabytes so it takes while to download
♦ The software will give you access to your images
♦ You need to be connected to the internet to run the application
4. When I am using Narrative I have no control of when the camera takes pictures. When I did not want to take pictures I had to remove the camera and put in my pocket, but it continued running and thus ran out of juice faster than I was able to turn it off when I did not want it to record. Narrative Clip supposed to go to sleep when the camera is in total darkness, but my Clip continued to take pictures. More than half of the pictures it took were just black. I want to have control of my devices, I need on/off button.
5. Quality of the photos is okay, but far from being as good as my SLR camera or even the camera on my phone. The camera does not do well in the dim light. The camera is not waterproof. My video contains 5 best pictures taken my Narrative during the first day I had Narrative Clip on. I also included 2 picture which were representative of 90% of the photos taken. Majority of photos are either too dark or I could not tell what the picture captured. These pictures are not editing in any way. I did not rotate them to make them appear in the proper orientation, the photos appear exactly as they were saved on my computer.
6. One feature that I liked is the ability to mark a picture as special. If you want to record a special picture you can double tap on the Clip. The clip will recognize it as an important picture and save it in the Starred Photos category.
7. The photos that are copied locally do not have geo-tags. In order to charge a monthly subscription Narrative makes local organization of photos more difficult.
What would make me like it more? If it behaved as a regular memory stick, allowed me to mount it on my computer and examine, edit, and censor the photos without uploading the photos to the cloud first. The current subscription fee is too expensive for the capabilities the camera provides.
You can find it on Amazon by following this link.
Ali Julia review ★☆☆☆☆
