Preview Results

Search nodes hand you a SEARCH_RESULTS object full of paths and scores - which is useful data and absolutely nothing you can look at. Preview Results is the eyeball node: it turns those results into a thumbnail grid image you can actually see, with similarity scores stamped under each tile. It's an output node (the pack's own OUTPUT_NODE), so it renders directly in ComfyUI's preview pane. Run a search, wire in Preview Results, and you finally see what the pack thinks matches.

The mechanism is straightforward: it reads each result's stored thumbnail (the pack kept one during indexing - that's why previews are instant even for video clips and 4000px RAW files), resizes them to the cell size, and pastes them into a grid with dark borders and a score label per cell. show_scores (default true) prints the similarity score under each thumbnail, which is genuinely the fastest way to learn what your scores mean for your library. If a thumbnail fails to load, it draws a red-outlined placeholder rather than crashing the whole grid.

Inputs

Required: results. Optional:

• columns (default 5) - grid width. More columns = smaller cells; the row count follows automatically.
• thumbnail_size (default 256) - cell size in pixels.
• max_images (default 25, up to 100) - how many results get shown. This is truncation, not filtering - see Filter by Score if you want to cut weak matches first.
• show_scores - toggle the score labels.

Outputs: preview_grid (IMAGE, a single grid tensor you could even save) and paths_list (STRING, the numbered file paths, newline-separated).

Install

Standard pack install - ComfyUI Manager (search "Semantic-Search") or git clone https://github.com/EricRollei/Semantic-Search into custom_nodes, install the requirements.txt deps, restart, nodes under Eric/SemanticSearch.

Where people get burned

• "My previews are all errors." The red Error placeholders mean thumbnails weren't readable - usually the index's thumbnails/ folder got separated from the metadata (e.g. you moved the index directory between machines) or the original files were deleted. Get Index Info will show the thumbnail count; a mismatch tells you the index is missing its cache.
• Grid looks empty but the search returned stuff. Either max_images is tiny or you filtered upstream. Bump it and re-run - previews are cheap since they use stored thumbnails.
• Expecting full-res images. Preview Results shows thumbnails by design. When you've picked your keepers, that's what Load Result Images is for - wire Preview and Load from the same search if you want to see the grid and grab the full files.

It's the node that makes the whole pack feel like a product instead of plumbing - the five seconds where "the machine found matches" becomes "I can see exactly what it found."