The time and cost of annotating ground-truth images and network training are major challenges to utilizing machine learning to automate the mining of volume electron microscopy data. In this issue, Gallusser et al. (2023. J. Cell Biol.https://doi.org/10.1083/jcb.202208005) present a less computationally intense pipeline to detect a single type of organelle using a limited number of loosely annotated images.