👑 FRED Checkpoint Loader With Name

Stock ComfyUI checkpoint loaders are fine until you need to know which checkpoint you used after the fact. FRED_CheckpointLoaderWithName is the same boring loader you already know, plus one extra wire: a clean model_name STRING output with the checkpoint's name, path and extension stripped off. That one wire unlocks every filename token and metadata feature in the rest of the FRED pack.

What it is

A thin wrapper around the normal checkpoint loading path. You get the familiar ckpt_name dropdown (everything in models/checkpoints), and it returns MODEL, CLIP and VAE just like CheckpointLoaderSimple. Nothing about the loading is different - no merging, no extra sampling logic. The only real question is what you plan to do with that name.

Two things make it worth using over the stock node:

1. model_name output - the bare filename without the path or .safetensors extension (e.g. realvisxlV40 rather than models/checkpoints/realvisxlV40.safetensors). strip_path_and_extension defaults to true; flip it off and you get the full path string instead, if some downstream consumer wants it.
2. It plugs directly into the FRED Image Saver's token system. Wire model_name into the saver's model_name input and your saved files come out named after the actual checkpoint, e.g. %model_name_%date_dash. Your output folder suddenly organizes itself by model, which is what a "which model made this?" archive actually needs.

How it works under the hood

It's literally a subclasses-or-wraps-the-standard-loader affair - load the checkpoint, keep the name around, emit it. It lives in FRED_ModelLoaderWithName.py in this pack (don't go hunting for a file named after the class; the display name and class name are FRED_CheckpointLoaderWithName).

What wires where

• MODEL, CLIP, VAE - into KSampler/CLIP Text Encode/VAE Decode exactly as you would from any checkpoint loader.
• model_name - into a FRED Image Saver's model_name input, a text display node, or anything that wants the model's identity as a string.

The one other input, strip_path_and_extension, is a boolean you will rarely touch after setting it once.

Install

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/Poukpalaova/ComfyUI-FRED-Nodes_v2.git

Restart ComfyUI, or find "ComfyUI FRED Nodes v2" in ComfyUI Manager. It has no extra Python dependencies beyond what the pack already pulls in - this node is pure plumbing.

Should you switch?

If you never look at your output filenames, honestly, no - the stock loader is fine. If you've ever stared at a folder of 00001_20260816_123456.png files wondering which model produced which, this node is the cheap fix: one node swap, and your filenames carry the model name forward. That's the whole pitch, and it's a good one.