FL Load Image

ComfyUI's stock LoadImage node only really wants to look in one place: its own input/ folder. That's fine until you've got reference images, datasets, or project assets scattered across your actual filesystem and you don't want to keep copying files into ComfyUI's directory just to load one of them. FL_LoadImage fixes that by giving you a server-side file browser that can point anywhere.

How it works. root_directory (default ./) is the folder the browser starts in - set it to wherever your images actually live. The node exposes server-side API endpoints so the browser widget on the node itself can walk that directory and let you pick a file interactively; selected_file (an optional string) holds whatever you picked, though because it's a plain string field in the schema, you could also skip the picker entirely and just type or paste a path directly if that's more convenient for a scripted workflow. It handles format quirks for you too - RGBA images get composited onto a white background and converted to RGB automatically, so transparent PNGs don't come out with weird artifacts.

Two outputs: IMAGE, the loaded image, and a STRING (the loaded file's name/path). Wire the image wherever you'd normally plug in a loaded image, and the string into a caption saver or logging node if you want to track provenance.

Installing it is the standard Fill-Nodes routine - search "Fill-Nodes" in ComfyUI Manager, or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/filliptm/ComfyUI_Fill-Nodes

• then restart ComfyUI. No model downloads, no heavy dependencies - it's file I/O and a small server endpoint.

One thing worth knowing before you rely on this in a shared or remote setup. Custom nodes in ComfyUI run as arbitrary Python with full filesystem access - that's just how the platform works, and it's the same reason the wider ecosystem has had real security incidents from malicious nodes in the past. A node that exposes a directory browser and reads arbitrary paths is doing exactly what it says it does and isn't unusual for this pack, but if you're running ComfyUI on a shared machine or exposed instance rather than your own local box, be deliberate about what root_directory you point it at, the same way you'd be careful with any tool that walks your filesystem on request.

Troubleshooting. If the file browser comes up empty or can't find your images, the most common cause is a path mismatch: root_directory needs to be a path the ComfyUI process itself can see, not necessarily the same as what you'd type on your local machine - this bites people running ComfyUI in Docker, on a remote server, or on a cloud GPU box, where "my images folder" on your laptop and the container's filesystem are two different things entirely. If you're in that kind of setup, mount or copy the folder somewhere the ComfyUI process can actually reach before pointing this node at it.