EZ Prompt Loader

This is the flagship node of the EZ-AF pack, and it exists because its author (who posted the pack to r/comfyui as artemyfast) got tired of wildcard systems. Traditional wildcards - __character__ style placeholders that a processor randomly fills - give you almost no visibility. EZ Prompt Loader is the opposite: it's a file loader with a proper UI that shows you the prompt files, filters them, shows thumbnails, and hands the content over as a string. The author's words from the launch thread: "Prompts with thumbnails feel so good honestly."

How it works

It scans ComfyUI/custom_nodes/ComfyUI-EZ-AF-Nodes/data/PROMPTS/ recursively - every subdirectory becomes a choice in the prompt_directory dropdown, and every .txt file inside becomes a selectable item. Thumbnails appear only if a .png with the same name as the .txt sits in the matching folder under data/THUMBNAILS/ (the relative folder structure has to mirror the prompts folder). No png, no thumbnail, no error - it just shows the filename.

Three outputs make it useful beyond "pick one prompt":

• STRING - the content of the selected file(s), comma-delimited if you picked several.
• OPT_DIRECTORY - the path of the current directory, handy for feeding other tooling.
• BATCH_SELECTED - a list of all selected items, which lets downstream nodes iterate a batch of prompts instead of just one. If nothing (or one item) is selected, this outputs all visible/filtered items - a sneaky way to run "all prompts in this folder."

The selection modes

• single - one item at a time, one output.
• multiple - tick several; they come out comma-joined.
• random - picks one at queue time. This is the wildcard replacement, and it's where the seed input matters: connect opt_seed and it's deterministic and stable; leave it unconnected and the node re-executes every queue so you get a new pick each run.

filter_text narrows the visible list by substring, and the node remembers your selections across workflow save/load - a nice quality-of-life touch you don't get from most custom loaders.

The real-world gotcha

From the actual community thread: one user reported the prompt_directory selector showing nothing and being uneditable even after a fresh reinstall. The usual cause with this pack is the data folder - if data/PROMPTS/ is empty or the install path isn't a normal custom_nodes checkout, the enum comes back empty and the widget looks dead. Put a .txt file in data/PROMPTS/, restart ComfyUI, and the dropdown should populate. This is a scan-at-load node, so it only picks up new files on restart.

Install

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/ez-af/ComfyUI-EZ-AF-Nodes.git

restart, or ComfyUI Manager → search ez-af. The pack's only deps are aiohttp and Pillow (Pillow does the thumbnail handling), and there are no model downloads. If you're coming from wildcards, the mental model is: your __folder__ is the directory dropdown, your __item__ is the file, and your randomness is the seed.