Plans to fit every photographer

Narrative starts at $10 per month on the Lite plan when billed annually, or $15 billed monthly. Standard is $20 annually or $29 monthly, Premium is $40 or $59, and Ultra is $60 or $79. Every plan includes unlimited projects and unlimited images, with no per-shoot or per-photo cap. Premium covers two users and Ultra covers four, so studios splitting a subscription usually land there.

Narrative is not permanently free. Every new account starts with a full free trial of Ultra, with no credit card required. Ultra is our most comprehensive plan, and the free trial is designed to give you a run of a real AI-assisted photo culling experience with your own gallery through it before deciding.

After the trial, paid plans start at $10 per month.

Yes, especially if you are a high-volume professional photographer.

Narrative users report saving 253 hours a year, on average. Against a Premium subscription at $480 annually, that math works out for most photographers shooting regularly. It works out less well if you shoot occasionally or in low volume.

Rather than take our word for it, run the free Ultra Trial on a full gallery from a recent shoot. One real wedding or portrait session will tell you more than any calculator.

Lite covers fast culling with focus scores and Ship to Lightroom. Standard adds the advanced AI culling features, Scenes View, the Close-Ups Panel, and unlimited editing with Core and Marketplace AI Presets. Premium adds AI Presets trained on your own edits, one colour and one black and white. Ultra extends that to five of each, plus dedicated onboarding and early access to new features.

The distinction that catches people out: an AI Preset trained on your editing style is Premium and Ultra only. Standard and Lite include our pre-built presets and the Marketplace, but not one trained on your work.

Yes. AI-Assisted Photo Culling is the core of the product. Narrative detects every face and key object in a shoot and assesses focus and eye state, flags whether a better frame likely exists within a scene, groups the shoot into scenes, and ranks images by sharpness.

The word that matters is assisted. The AI does the sorting, assessing, and ranking. You make every final selection. That is a deliberate design decision, not a limitation.

There isn't one answer, because the right tool depends on how you work. If you want the AI to make selections for you, fully automated tools suit that. If you want speed and convenience without handing over the editorial call, assisted culling is the better fit.

Narrative is built for the second group: photographers who shoot high volume, work in Lightroom or Capture One, and want their own judgement preserved in the final gallery. We keep honest side-by-side breakdowns against Lightroom Classic, Aftershoot, Imagen AI, Evoto, and Photo Mechanic on our comparison pages.

Both names point to the same software. The app is called Narrative. Narrative Select (Select + Edit) is the earlier name, and it still appears in some page titles and URLs because it is what a lot of photographers search for.

It is one app covering both halves of the workflow: AI-Assisted Culling for choosing your images, and 1-Click AI Editing for applying your style on the way to Lightroom. You may also come across "Narrative Cull" and "Narrative Edit" in older articles and reviews. Those were never separate products, just earlier names for the two feature areas.

Narrative Publish is a different product. It builds image-heavy blog posts and publishes them to your site, and it is sold separately.