DP Load Checkpoint With Info

This is the stock Load Checkpoint node with one extra wire: besides the usual MODEL, CLIP, and VAE, it hands you a text string describing the checkpoint you loaded. That sounds trivial until you're twenty images deep in a batch and can't remember which of your six near-identical SDXL merges made the good one. The info output is there so you can stamp the model name onto the output and never wonder again.

It's one of the loader nodes in DesertPixelAi's Desert Pixel pack - a big utility-heavy collection where a lot of the nodes are "the normal thing, plus a small helpful extra."

How it works

Functionally it's CheckpointLoaderSimple. You pick a file from ckpt_name and it loads the three things every SD workflow needs:

• model (MODEL) - the UNet, into your sampler.
• clip (CLIP) - the text encoder, into your CLIP Text Encode nodes.
• vae (VAE) - into your VAE Decode.

The fourth output, model_info (STRING), is the reason this node exists: a text block about the loaded checkpoint that you can route into a save node's caption or filename, or a text preview, so the model is recorded alongside the image.

The input that matters

There's exactly one input - ckpt_name - and it's a dropdown of the checkpoints in your ComfyUI/models/checkpoints folder. On a fresh or cloud instance with no checkpoints installed, that dropdown will be empty; that's not the node failing, it's just that there's nothing to list yet. Point it at your models folder and your files show up.

Everything downstream wires exactly as it would from a normal loader. The only new habit is grabbing model_info and sending it somewhere it'll be saved.

How to install it

ComfyUI Manager: search Desert Pixel, install, restart. Or by hand:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/DesertPixelAi/ComfyUI-Desert-Pixel-Nodes

Restart ComfyUI; pip install -r requirements.txt if present. No model downloads for the node itself - it loads the checkpoints you already have. It shows up under the DP category.

Common issues & troubleshooting

The dropdown is empty. No checkpoints in ComfyUI/models/checkpoints means nothing to pick. Drop a .safetensors in there and refresh, or reload the page. This is the single most common "the node is broken" report for any checkpoint loader and it's almost never the node.

It's just a loader - treat it like one. MODEL, CLIP, and VAE behave identically to the stock loader's outputs, so any wiring guide for a normal checkpoint applies here unchanged. The only difference is the extra info string.

The info text doesn't appear anywhere. model_info is an output, not a display widget. Wire it into a text preview or into your save node's caption/filename field, otherwise it does nothing you can see.