For some, the best pictures are candid pictures, but even the smallest handheld cameras aren’t discreet enough, nor are people ready enough, to capture truly candid moments. The Narrative Clip’s ($229) small and lightweight body is convenient, and it may be worth capturing the shock and disbelief on people’s faces when you tell them about the Clip’s high price tag—which, incidentally, is still less expensive than the $400 OMG Life Autographer. But for the same money, you could get GoPro’s Hero3+ White Edition, which you can set to take time-lapse stills at several more interval settings than the Clip’s sole 30-second setting. And it records video, too—a must for dedicated lifeloggers. The GoPro isn’t as inconspicuous as the Clip, but that still doesn’t help justify the Clip’s price tag.

Design
Measuring 1.42 by 1.42 by 0.35 inches (HWD) and weighing only 0.7 ounce, you can get the Clip in white, gray, or orange. The device’s front is bare, save for the phone-camera-style lens that is slightly recessed into the top right of the Clip. On the right side is a micro USB port to charge and connect to a computer with the included micro USB cable. The top edge contains four LEDs that glow white to indicate battery life, and to notify you that you’ve taken a Moment, which is basically a picture you’ve taken yourself by tapping twice on the device itself. A clip on the Clip’s back lets you attach it to clothing or bag straps (or anything the clip can hang on to, for that matter).

Features and App
The Narrative Clip automatically takes a picture every 30 seconds with its 5-megapixel camera until you place it face down on a surface—the Clip’s built-in accelerometer pauses the photo stream—or if it’s in total darkness. The accelerometer also makes sure pictures are correctly oriented regardless of how the Clip is worn. It has 8GB of on-board storage for your photos, which should be good for 6,000 pictures, and its rechargeable battery lasts up to 30 hours.

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Unfortunately, rather than being able to occasionally check the pictures the Clip has taken during the day on your mobile device, the only way to view your pictures is by connecting the Clip to your computer and uploading them to Narrative’s cloud (and optionally, to your computer’s internal drive) via the Narrative Uploader software for Windows or Mac.

Narrative’s Cloud service sorts through your uploaded pictures and picks the best ones according to Narrative’s Smart System, which analyzes GPS location (with the Clip’s built-in GPS), time, lighting, motion, colorfulness, and photo composition. It has face detection and also rotates photos to the upright orientation to create albums, or what Narrative calls Moments. Your Moments are stored in the cloud and you can view, save, and share your pictures from your mobile device using the Narrative app, which is available for free on iOS and Android devices.

Narrative’s Smart System doesn’t really do a decent job at sorting through the day’s pictures and creating Moments. I still don’t trust a computer to decide whether certain pictures make the cut. There were a few that the Smart System didn’t include in my Moments that I wanted to keep, but never would have seen had I not reviewed the pictures myself from my computer. And there were several totally useless pictures of my palm that somehow made the cut.

As with most cloud services, Narrative’s isn’t free. You can get either a three- or 12-month subscription when you buy the Clip ($229 and $279 respectively, Clip included), and you can decide for yourself whether you want to keep subscribing to the Cloud service for $9 per month for the Moments. Otherwise, you could just upload your pictures to your computer to view, manually rotate, create your own albums, and share yourself.

Camera and Conclusion
If you set high expectations on the Clip’s camera quality (due to its high price), you’re going to be disappointed. Narrative itself states that the Clip’s camera performs best in bright environments rather than darker ones, which is fairly common for most inexpensive phone cameras. Indeed, the Clip has trouble picking up enough light in darker environments. And pictures are very noisy, and sometimes appear as if they’ve had some sort of Instagram filter added to them. Bring the Clip outside to a bright, sunny environment and noise is greatly reduced, but pictures are still very soft.

However, there’s something to be said about the Clip’s grainy, blurry, yet candid pictures. It was a pleasantly refreshing break from the staged, high-resolution photos most of us are used to. When I wore the Clip on my shirt, many pictures were taken at off angles, non-suspecting subjects weren’t in the frame’s center (and often in a good way), and some of the blurry snaps were accidentally artful. Yet, there were times I wished the Clip took straighter, sharper pictures, which only seems possible if you’re standing still or if the Clip is mounted to a stationary object.

The Narrative Clip costs much less than the OMG Life Autographer, and is smaller and easier to conceal, although the Autographer records video. Still, the Clip is still priced the same as GoPro’s entry-level Hero3+ White Edition action camera, which does what the Clip does, and much, much more. The two areas where the Clip trumps the GoPro are mobility and subtlety, as you would need GoPro’s $40 chest harness for it to be as wearable as the Clip. But that would look odd and conspicuous at certain events, such as family gatherings or hanging out with friends. If you desperately need a life-capturing camera, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t get the $200 GoPro instead, even if you have to sacrifice some discretion. Otherwise, you should probably wait until Narrative comes out with less expensive models of the Clip, as $229 is a lot of money to pay for a dedicated lifelogging device that doesn’t record video.