The combination of time-lapse imaging of live cells with high-throughput perturbation assays is a powerful tool for genetics and cell biology. The Mitocheck project employed this technique to associate thousands of genes with transient biological phenotypes in cell division, cell death and migration. The original analysis of these data proceeded by assigning nuclear morphologies to cells at each time-point using automated image classification, followed by description of population frequencies and temporal distribution of cellular states through event-order maps. One of the choices made by that analysis was not to rely on temporal tracking of the individual cells, due to the relatively low image sampling frequency, and to focus on effects that could be discerned from population-level behaviour.