Load Diffusers Model (DEPRECATED)

Every model ecosystem has a format it grumbles about, and for ComfyUI that's the Hugging Face diffusers directory layout. Load Diffusers Model is the core node that reads it - a folder of separate subdirectories (unet/, text_encoder/, vae/, plus a model_index.json) instead of one tidy safetensors file. It's marked DEPRECATED in the source, but it's still there because sometimes you genuinely have a diffusers-format model and no other loader will touch it.

How it works

The node walks your models/diffusers/ folder looking for directories that contain a model_index.json - that file is the format's marker - and lists each one found as a model_path option. When you pick one, it loads the whole directory through ComfyUI's diffusers loader and returns the standard triple: MODEL, CLIP, and VAE.

The single input, model_path, is auto-populated from the scan. That's the whole interface: drop a diffusers-format model folder under models/diffusers/, refresh, select it. Note the node also validates that the path you select actually contains model_index.json - pick something that isn't a proper diffusers model and it raises a clean FileNotFoundError rather than silently producing garbage.

Why it's deprecated

Two reasons, and they're different flavors of the same story. First, the diffusers format is a pain in a single-file world: a folder full of split weights is awkward to manage, slower to scan, and hostile to the "drop one file in, drag one node in" workflow everyone actually uses. Second, ComfyUI's ecosystem converged on the single-safetensors convention - modern loaders like Load Diffusion Model (UNETLoader) and the CLIP loaders expect one file each, and most Hugging Face releases now also publish a merged safetensors precisely so ComfyUI users don't need this node.

The case where it's still your friend

If you have a model that only ships as a diffusers folder - some fine-tunes and community conversions never bother with a merged checkpoint - this node is the difference between using it and not using it. Just don't build new workflows around it. The deprecation flag means it's not getting love, and whatever reason you have for the format, the ecosystem's answer is increasingly "convert it to a single file instead."

One practical note: because the loader scans folders rather than listing files, it can be slower to populate than the file-based loaders, and it picks up only directories that sit directly in the diffusers search paths. Nested or oddly-placed model folders won't show up until you put them where the scanner looks.