A candid camera that stalked me in the bathroom Forward-looking: the Narrative Clip fastened to Tim Bradshaw's clothing snapped images every 30 seconds all day Narrative Clip wearable camera (rating: 2/5) The cameraman who blocks the aisle as the bride walks to the altar. The woman at the concert who makes you watch the band through her phone screen. The dining companion who will not let you eat until the dish has been photographed. There are many occasions where the production of a camera can spoil an experience. Yet these are often the moments we most want to capture. Makers of wearable cameras, such as Swedish start-up Narrative, argue that it is better to put a camera directly on your person than hold it between your subject and yourself. The Narrative Clip that I have been testing for two weeks, which costs $279, looks deceptively simple: a square with rounded corners, about an inch across, with a tiny lens in one corner. There are no buttons, just a row of four tiny lights on the side that indicate battery life (it lasts a couple of days). The Clip takes a still photograph every 30 seconds all day long, unless you place it face down on a table. Then you plug it into a PC, from which its software sucks all those images up into the cloud, before sending back what it thinks are the best to a smartphone app. This removes the burden of storing huge quantities of images, running into gigabytes over a day, on your own PC. Its inbuilt GPS and timer allow Narrative to separate groups of pictures based on where and when you took them. The automatic sorting still leaves you with dozens or even hundreds of images but the Narrative app lets you view a speedy slideshow of everything, rather than swiping one at a time. You then "star" the best ones to download to the phone's memory or share them via Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or email. While far better than doing it manually, this method does mean Narrative's servers contain all those intimate photos, so we must hope they are not targeted by hackers. The first year is free with the purchase of the camera, but after that it charges $9 per month for automatic organisation (based on pattern recognition of things such as faces) and enough cloud storage for "normal everyday use." A recently launched rival wearable camera, the Autographer, which costs $399 (£290 in the UK), is slightly bigger and looks more camera-like, with additional features such as instant wireless sharing from the camera to a smartphone. While the two models have different features, the bigger question is why would someone wear a camera like this every day? After trying the Narrative Clip for a few days, I find it hard to believe many people outside of the obsessive "quantified self" movement will. Parents who want to capture their kids" every moment or holidaymakers on a particularly picturesque trip might, but most of us will save it for certain occasions. I wore the Clip in a variety of situations: in the office, riding my bike and at restaurants with friends. I mindlessly wore it in the toilet, although thankfully the images it took were just of the wall and plumbing. A trip to the barber's created a fun time-lapse of my hair being cut, reflected in the mirror - which I turned into a video using an app called Flipagram (see below). There is clearly a tension created by wearing a tiny camera - for both the photographer and those subjects who are aware of it. The people who quizzed me were generally relieved it was just capturing stills and not audio. Friends soon grew accustomed to it and acted naturally rather than mugging for my midriff. Only a few people became alarmed ("Don't I need to sign a waiver for that?" asked a man in a bike shop). I think good friends on both sides of the lens might be prepared to tolerate this tension if the output from the camera was good enough. In my short test, it simply was not. While the picture quality is good in bright daylight, it was grainy indoors and wearing it on clothes made it hard to ensure a good angle. Overall, it caught too few of the natural, candid shots of friends I had hoped for. Nearly 3,000 Kickstarter backers put up a collective $550,000 to be first to receive the Narrative Clip in November 2012, back when the company was named Memoto. Clearly there is some appetite for this product and I was excited by the idea when I first heard of it back then. I will give the Clip another try on my next ski trip, long bike ride or other naturally photogenic escapade, given its negligible physical burden. But for everyday use, or even at a wedding or concert, feeling like a creep is not worth the images I will get in return. What it is: Flipagram, free for iOS and Android Why you should try it: Flipagram takes a sequence of still images - such as those taken by a smartphone or a wearable camera, such as Narrative - and stitches them together to make a short video in Instagram-friendly square format. The insta-slideshow can be set to music, drawing on an extensive library of popular songs, some of which the app charges for.