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A whiteboard photo with magnets showing a football exercise next to the Driblo app displaying the same exercise digitally recreated with players, cones, and filled-in coaching metadata
Tips & Guides

AI Drill Importer: Upload a Photo, Get an Editable Drill

March 1, 2026

4 min read

AI Drill Importer: Upload a Photo, Get an Editable Drill

Every coach has been there. You spot a brilliant exercise in a coaching book. A teammate shares a drill on Instagram. You sketch something on the whiteboard during a session that just works. The exercise is great — but getting it into your digital library means starting from scratch. Placing every player, dropping every cone, drawing every arrow, typing every rule. By the time you're done recreating it, the inspiration has faded into admin work.

What if you could just take a photo and have the exercise ready to edit?

Introducing the AI Drill Importer — upload a photo or screenshot of any football exercise, and the AI automatically analyzes the image and recreates it as a fully editable exercise in your library. No manual rebuilding. No tedious redrawing. Just snap, import, and customize.

How It Works

Three Steps, Seconds Each

  1. Upload — Take a photo or screenshot of any football exercise and upload it to Driblo
  2. AI Analysis — The importer scans the image, identifies every visual element, and extracts the coaching context behind the drill
  3. Edit & Save — Review the result on the canvas, make any adjustments, and save it to your exercise library

The result is not a static copy of the image. It is a set of fully editable canvas elements — identical to exercises you create from scratch in the Exercise Designer.

What the AI Sees

Visual Elements on the Canvas

The AI recognizes and places the core building blocks of any exercise:

  • Player positions — including team colors, numbers, and groupings
  • Cones and markers — standard training equipment placed accurately
  • Goals — full-size, mini-goals, and gates
  • Pitch markings — field lines, penalty areas, center circles
  • Zones — highlighted areas on the pitch
  • Movement arrows — passing lines, running paths, dribbling routes
  • Dimensions and format — reads measurements like "10 x 10 m" and exercise format like "4v2"

Exercise Intelligence — Beyond the Image

The AI doesn't stop at placing objects on a canvas. It reads the coaching intent behind the image and fills in the metadata that makes an exercise truly useful:

  • Exercise explanation — rules and instructions extracted and written out
  • Coaching principles — tactical points the drill develops, automatically selected
  • Tags — categorization generated for easy library search
  • Progression & regression — suggestions for how to make the drill harder or easier
  • Focus — automatically determines In Possession or Out of Possession

The AI doesn't just trace the image — it understands the exercise. Visual elements become interactive objects. Written context becomes structured metadata. A static picture becomes a living drill.

Where Your Exercises Come From

The beauty of the importer is that it works with exercises from anywhere:

  • Coaching books — Digitize your favorite drills from printed material
  • Social media — Screenshot exercises from Instagram, Twitter, or YouTube stills
  • Whiteboard sketches — Photograph hand-drawn drills with magnets, markers, or chalk
  • PDF handouts — Import exercises shared by coaching education programs
  • Other coaching platforms — Bring exercises from older or different tools into Driblo

The AI handles different visual styles — clean professional diagrams, rough hand-drawn sketches, photos of physical setups with real cones and players. It is trained on the patterns of football exercises, not on a single specific format.

Fully Editable, Fully Yours

Every imported exercise is a first-class citizen in your library. It works with every tool in Driblo, just like exercises you build from scratch:

  • Add animations to show player movement sequences
  • Link to your Style of Play for tactical alignment
  • Assign real players with Auto Position
  • Plan sessions by dropping the exercise into your training schedule
  • Share to the community or keep it private to your club

Nothing is locked. Nothing is read-only. The imported exercise is yours to evolve.

Why This Matters

  • Build your library faster — Years of collected exercises from books, courses, and colleagues, imported in minutes
  • Never lose a drill again — That whiteboard sketch survives beyond the next training session
  • Bridge analog and digital — Physical coaching resources become interactive digital tools
  • Focus on coaching, not drawing — Spend your time on tactical decisions, not canvas busywork

The AI Drill Importer is available now in Driblo. Upload a photo, let the AI do the work, and start customizing. Your exercise library just got a lot easier to build.

Try the AI Drill Importer

Frequently Asked Questions

The AI Drill Importer lets you upload a photo or screenshot of any football exercise, and the AI automatically analyzes the image to recreate it as a fully editable exercise in your library. It recognizes player positions, cones, goals, and pitch markings, and also extracts exercise rules, tags, progression and regression points, and whether the focus is in possession or out of possession.

You can upload photos of coaching book pages, screenshots of drills from social media or websites, pictures of whiteboard sketches with magnets, and even hand-drawn diagrams. The AI is trained to recognize common football exercise elements regardless of the image source or drawing style.

Beyond placing players, cones, and goals on the canvas, the AI also fills in the exercise explanation with rules and instructions, selects relevant coaching principles, generates tags for your library, adds progression and regression points, and determines whether the exercise focuses on in possession or out of possession play.

Yes, every imported exercise is fully editable. The AI creates standard canvas elements — players, cones, goals, zones, arrows — that you can move, resize, recolor, add to, or delete. All extracted metadata like rules, tags, and progressions can also be modified. The imported drill is a starting point you can customize to match your exact training needs.

The AI Drill Importer is available to all Driblo users. Upload a photo, let the AI analyze it, review the result, and save it to your exercise library. It works seamlessly with the rest of Driblo's session planning and exercise management tools.

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Driblo Team

Editorial

The Driblo team shares insights on football coaching and AI technology.

Published March 1, 2026