Ai_doubao_seedream

Seedream is ByteDance's own image model line, and unlike a lot of what TikTok's parent company puts out, it's never coming to a local checkpoint you can download - ByteDance runs a deliberate split where its research tools and components (SDXL-Lightning, PuLID, Depth Anything) go open, but anything it considers a finished product, Seedream and Seedance included, stays API-only. This node is how you reach that product from inside ComfyUI: you send it an image and a prompt, it sends back generated images, and every request costs a call against your own API key.

Don't let the class name fool you into thinking this is text-to-image - main_image1 is a required IMAGE input, so this node is built around having a source image to work from (edit, restyle, extend) rather than generating from nothing. You can hand it up to three more reference images through the optional image2, image3, and image4 slots, which is genuinely useful for multi-image composition or style-transfer style prompts. Besides the image and your prompt, you pick a model (the dropdown offers two dated snapshots, doubao-seedream-4-5-251128 and doubao-seedream-4-0-250828 - Seedream 4.5 and 4.0 respectively), set a seed (-1 for random), max_images (1–15, how many outputs you want back from one call), and auto_resize (crop / pad / stretch - how the node reconciles your reference image's aspect ratio with what the model expects). The output is a single IMAGE.

The api_key field is optional in the schema, which almost certainly means the pack expects it configured elsewhere (an environment variable or a shared config file) if you leave it blank - but the straightforward path is to just paste your own key directly into the field.

Installing it: search "ComfyUI-Apt_Preset" in ComfyUI Manager, or clone by hand - cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes && git clone https://github.com/cardenluo/ComfyUI-Apt_Preset - then run install.bat and restart. No model weights to download for this node; it's a pure API client.

Getting the API key is the actual friction point, and worth knowing before you install anything. Seedream is sold through Volcano Engine (ByteDance's cloud platform), which is a Chinese-market-first product - the console is Chinese by default, and account verification for this tier of service commonly expects a mainland China phone number. If you don't have one, budget time for that step before you budget time for the node itself; this isn't a "sign up with Google in thirty seconds" API.

Troubleshooting: an empty or failed response is almost always an auth problem - double-check the key is valid, has billing/quota attached on the Volcano Engine side, and that you copied it without trailing whitespace. If main_image1 is genuinely required and you leave it disconnected, expect the node to error rather than silently fall back to text-only generation - this node doesn't do pure text-to-image, so if that's what you want, look elsewhere in the pack (or at a locally-hosted model) instead of fighting this one into a shape it isn't built for.