📷Base Model Loader locally

This is the "I already have SDXL checkpoints" version of the pack's base loader. Where its sibling BaseModel_Loader_fromhub downloads a model from Hugging Face by repo id, this one loads a .safetensors checkpoint straight from your local ComfyUI/models/checkpoints folder - same pipe output, same place in the graph, zero gigabytes of downloading.

You use it when you've got an SDXL checkpoint you like (RealVisXL, Juggernaut, or any of the SDXL realism family) and don't want to double-download it into a diffusers cache just because a node wants it. If you're starting from scratch with nothing downloaded, the fromhub version is actually simpler - pick the checkpoint name in the dropdown here only if the file is already on disk.

Mechanically it's the same pipeline as the hub loader, but built through diffusers' from_single_file instead of from_pretrained, in float16 with safetensors. That single-file path is why it can't tell you what's in the file - it just loads it. Two practical constraints follow. It has to be an SDXL checkpoint: PhotoMaker's adapter is SDXL-only, so a 1.5 or Pony file will fail or produce nonsense downstream. And it should be a normal single-file SDXL .safetensors; if your checkpoint lives in a diffusers folder structure rather than as one file, you're on the wrong node.

The only required input is ckpt_name, which shows up as a dropdown populated from your checkpoints folder - no typing, just pick. (That's why it has no default value in the schema: the list is built from your install at runtime.) It outputs a pipe (MODEL) that you feed into a PhotoMakerAdapter_Loader_fromhub or PhotoMakerAdapter_Loader_local node, then into the generation node. The graph shape never changes whether you load from hub or locally - you're only swapping the source of the model.

Installing the pack is the standard once-per-machine setup: ComfyUI Manager (search "PhotoMaker") or

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/ZHO-ZHO-ZHO/ComfyUI-PhotoMaker-ZHO
cd ComfyUI-PhotoMaker-ZHO
pip install -r requirements.txt

Restart ComfyUI and you're done - the node reads your existing checkpoints folder, no model download required. One thing worth knowing: this is an unmaintained diffusers-wrapper pack (last touched April 2024), and it's heavier and slower than the native PhotoMaker nodes that eventually shipped in ComfyUI itself. It still works fine, but if you're choosing between this pack and a native workflow, the native one wins on RAM and speed.