In this work we aim to assess the performance of coupled-trajectory methods derived from the exact factorization in describing the photo-isomerization reaction in a retinal chromophore model . The assessment of CT-MQC and CT-TSH will be carried out based on the benchmark against quantum vibronic wavepacket dynamics -already performed for CT-MQC in previous work -as well as based on the comparison with quantum trajectories . Since our working framework is the exact factorization, quantum trajectories are determined by evolving them with the (exact) time-dependent potentials of the theory. The potentials are constructed from the solution of the time-dependent Schrödinger equation and, thus, can be viewed as incorporating all quantum dynamical effects of the electrons on the nuclei in nonadiabatic conditions. Our quantum trajectories are, in this sense, the best possible trajectory-based description of the photo-isomerization process, thus allowing us to assess how well the coupled-trajectory approximate methods (could) perform. In addition, we will analyze the time-dependent potentials themselves in order to show that despite the used retinal model is very simple (two-dimensional in nuclear space with two electronic states) their behavior at long times is complex and, consequently, difficult to capture in a trajectory-based description of the dynamics, as was pointed out in previous work.