Controlled ControlNet Loader

Every ControlNet workflow has that moment where you'd rather the ControlNet just not load - you're testing a branch, or the pose image is missing, or the model is the difference between fitting in VRAM and not. Stock ComfyUI will load it anyway. Controlled ControlNet Loader is the pack's answer: the standard ControlNetLoader plus a trigger input, so you decide whether it loads at all.

The deal is identical to the pack's other Controlled nodes. Connect the trigger, get a CONTROL_NET output that plugs into the control_net input of a ControlNetApply node. Leave the trigger empty and the node prints "loading paused" and hands you None. In the source it's a handful of lines delegating to the stock ControlNetLoader.load_controlnet(), nothing more. Given the pack's memory-management framing, the pitch is: a ControlNet you didn't trigger is a ControlNet that isn't eating VRAM.

The honest caveats apply, same as everywhere in this pack. A paused loader returns None, and ControlNetApply will throw a fit if you feed it a None where a CONTROL_NET belongs - so this is a skip switch, not a conditional. And worth saying plainly: ControlNets are small relative to the checkpoint and the text encoder; they're rarely the OOM culprit. The real value is workflow hygiene - toggling a ControlNet branch without rebuilding the graph, or making a ControlNet optional in a template. For genuinely tight VRAM, the bigger lever is how you load the diffusion model itself (fp8, GGUF, or the pack's delete nodes once it's done).

The inputs that matter

Inputs are just the control_net_name picker and the trigger.

Install

Install ships with the pack: ComfyUI Manager, search "DeleteModelPassthrough", or clone https://github.com/Isi-dev/ComfyUI_DeleteModelPassthrough into custom_nodes and restart. No downloads, no extra deps. It's a niche utility node from a WIP pack with almost no community footprint, so it's really about whether you like the trigger pattern - if you don't need conditional loading, the stock loader does the identical job.