Eric's Metadata Debugger V2

The most annoying failure mode of a metadata-heavy pipeline isn't the write - it's the mystery. You saved an image "with metadata," you open it later, and nothing's there. Or the query node returns unknown when you know the prompt is in the file. Eric's Metadata Debugger V2 is the node you run when that happens: it checks every place metadata could be hiding and tells you exactly where it found it (or didn't).

Here's the thing about this pack: it writes to up to four separate homes for metadata - embedded in the image (EXIF/XMP), an XMP sidecar, a human-readable .txt, and a database - and it reads them back with a fallback chain. When something's off, you can't guess which leg of the chain failed. The debugger takes one filepath (a string, paste the path or feed it from a node like Eric Load Image Extended's full_path output) and goes through your checklist for you.

The checkboxes are self-explanatory and honest about the defaults: check_xmp and check_embedded are on by default, check_text and check_database are off until you ask. show_raw_data dumps the unfiltered metadata instead of the cleaned summary - use it when you suspect the problem is on the write side, and verbose adds more console chatter for deeper dives. The single output, debug_info, is a plain string report. There's nothing to wire it into downstream; this is a diagnostic node, not a data node.

Mechanically it just runs the pack's MetadataService.read_metadata against each enabled source and composes what it finds into a report. No heavy lifting, no model files. It's the boring kind of node - and it's exactly the one you'll reach for at 11pm when a query comes back empty.

Worth knowing before you install: this whole pack is a one-author effort with essentially no community presence, so there's no Reddit thread full of people's debugger war stories. That's fine here because the tool is self-contained. The real troubleshooting advice: if check_embedded finds nothing but check_xmp does, your reader is looking in the wrong place, and you fix it in the query node by setting source explicitly instead of auto.

Install is the pack standard - ComfyUI Manager (search AAA Metadata System) or manually:

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

Then restart and find it under Eric's Nodes → Metadata. It won't generate anything pretty, but when your metadata pipeline lies to you, this is the node that makes it confess.