> provided you're willing to label 200 or so images

A quick note to say that this is also a task you can hand to things like gemini.

Yep- this is what I do. I use a high quality VLM to generate labelled boxes (in my case, around tardigrades in a microscope image), do some light editing to fix the small number of errors, and then train YOLO26 with it. Works great, saved me tens of hours of labelling. It's a bit scary that there is a VLM that works as well as my fine-tuned model (although much slower).

thats a fantastic strategy thank you, and thanks to all the other helpful posters as well here. do you have any tips for how to choose the base yolo model? or just any generic one will do?