🌐 Load Image From URL

ComfyUI's stock Load Image wants a file on disk. This one will also take a URL, a path you paste in, or a file you drag onto the node, and it outputs both IMAGE and MASK like the native node does. The reason it exists in this pack is the web-interface integration: the name field is a label that the pack's frontend uses to generate an actual upload field, so a hosted ComfyUI frontend can hand an image to the graph without you managing files by hand.

The three inputs that do the real work: image (the drag-and-drop/upload field - it's a string internally, defaulting to empty), url (paste any http(s) URL and it overrides the uploaded image if both are present), and return_image_mode (RGB, RGBA, or L for grayscale - pick RGBA if you need to preserve alpha). Under the hood it uses requests to fetch, handles file:// URLs and local filesystem paths, and caches a preview of remote images so the UI isn't re-downloading on every render.

The two safety nets worth knowing

• enabled - when off, the node returns a 64x64 placeholder image instead of loading anything. The tooltip says it plainly: it's for API calls where the input genuinely isn't needed. Keeps a pipeline from erroring on an empty field.
• fallback_image - an IMAGE input used when both URL and upload are empty. This is the one people sleep on: feed it a crop or a default image and the graph keeps running even when nothing was provided, which is perfect for pipelines where a default is better than a crash.

Outputs

IMAGE is the loaded image; MASK is the standard all-white mask companion that the native Load Image also emits (so any node expecting a mask pair works out of the box). Use IMAGE for anything downstream.

Installation

Part of the ComfyUI-ArchAi3d-Qwen pack - install via ComfyUI Manager ("ArchAi3d Qwen") or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes/
git clone https://github.com/amir84ferdos/ComfyUI-ArchAi3d-Qwen.git
cd ComfyUI-ArchAi3d-Qwen
pip install -r requirements.txt

Restart and find it under ArchAi3d/Image. Pack installs the usual broad dependency list; this node itself only needs requests and Pillow, which ComfyUI already has. Dual license: free personal, paid commercial.

Where people get burned

The URL path has a 30-second timeout baked in, so hotlinking a giant 4K file off a slow server will fail where a direct download would have worked - save the file locally and use a path instead. If you paste a local path, it must be a path the ComfyUI process can see (its own filesystem, not your browser's). And a subtle one: enabled off doesn't "skip" the node, it outputs the placeholder - so if a downstream node is resizing to fit, you'll get 64x64 garbage instead of an error. That's the intended API-call behavior, but it confuses people debugging a silent bad output.