comfyui-clipboard-image-loader

ComfyUI Clipboard Image Loader

A LoadImage-style node that automatically detects the image currently on your OS clipboard, shows a live thumbnail on the node, and outputs it as an IMAGE / MASK pair. Copy an image anywhere on your machine and the node picks it up — no upload, no Ctrl+V.

Node

Load Image (Clipboard) — category image

| Output | Type | Notes | | ------ | ------- | ------------------------------------------------------- | | IMAGE | IMAGE | RGB tensor, same conversion as the built-in LoadImage. | | MASK | MASK | Alpha channel as a mask (zeros if the image is opaque). |

Optional input error_if_empty (default on): when nothing has been captured yet, the node raises a clear error. Turn it off to instead output a 64×64 black image.

How it works

• A small frontend extension polls the backend every ~1.5 s.
• The backend uses the Windows clipboard sequence number as a cheap change check and only grabs the bitmap (via PIL.ImageGrab.grabclipboard()) when the clipboard actually changed. The captured image is saved into ComfyUI's temp directory.
• The node's filename is stored in a hidden widget; at run time the node loads that file, so the thumbnail you see is exactly what flows downstream.
• IS_CHANGED returns the file hash, so re-running with the same clipboard image is cached, and copying a new image causes the node to re-run.

When you copy a new image, the thumbnail updates automatically; the new image is used the next time you run the workflow (it does not auto-queue).

Requirements / platform notes

• Pillow (already required by ComfyUI). On Windows, pywin32 is used for the cheap sequence-number check (optional — falls back gracefully).
• Clipboard reading happens on the server, so this assumes ComfyUI runs on the same machine you copy images on (the normal local setup).
• Works on Windows and macOS via ImageGrab. On Linux, ImageGrab.grabclipboard() requires xclip or wl-paste to be installed.

Install

Clone into ComfyUI/custom_nodes/ and restart ComfyUI:

ComfyUI/custom_nodes/comfyui-clipboard-image-loader/

Then add Load Image (Clipboard) from the image category.