Folder File Selector

Folder File Selector is the ComfyUI equivalent of a file dialog you can't actually get: it scans a folder, hands you a dropdown of what's inside, and outputs the full path as a plain string you can wire into any loader. If your workflow rotates through a handful of reference images, prompt files, or checkpoints that all live in one directory, this saves you the typing.

It ships in artyclaw/artyclaw-comfy, the author's personal grab-bag of prompt/IO/RNG utilities. The author built these "for me only, but maybe you find them helpful" - which is exactly why the default folder is doc/autoprompt, a leftover from their own pipeline. You'll want to change that.

How it works

Here's the important quirk: the file list is scanned once, at node import. When ComfyUI starts, the node looks in DEFAULT_FOLDER (hardcoded in the source as doc/autoprompt, resolved relative to the ComfyUI working directory) and builds the file_select dropdown from what it finds. If nothing's there, file_select degrades to a plain text box so old workflows don't error out - the tooltip literally says "No files found at load time. Type a filename here."

The source is upfront about the limitation: changing folder_path in the UI does not repopulate the dropdown, because the options were frozen at import. Press R in ComfyUI to reload custom nodes after you've added files to the folder. The node's IS_CHANGED hook watches the folder's modification time, so once the dropdown is rebuilt, re-running works as expected.

The inputs that matter

• folder_path - the folder to list from. Defaults to doc/autoprompt; set it to something real.
• file_select - the dropdown of files found at import time, or a type-in if the scan found nothing.

The single file_path output is the joined absolute path of your selection. One honest caveat from the source: if the selected file doesn't exist, the node still returns the constructed path and prints a warning to the console - it assumes you want to see what it tried to do rather than fail silently.

Install

Manager → search ArtyClaw Comfy Nodes, or manually:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/artyclaw/artyclaw-comfy

Restart ComfyUI. No dependencies, no model files - it's a few dozen lines of pure Python.

Where people get burned

Every issue with this node traces back to import-time behavior. The dropdown being empty at load is the classic one - if your folder exists but has files, the folder is probably a relative path that resolves differently than you expect, or you added the files after ComfyUI started. Fix: press R to reload, or restart. The second trap is forgetting that folder_path edits won't refresh the list - that's not a bug, it's the design. And because the default folder is the author's personal doc/autoprompt, a stock install gives you an empty dropdown until you either change the default in the source or set the folder path. If you need a picker that rescans live, the big file-management packs (WAS Node Suite) are heavier but do exactly that - this one is the lightweight personal-tool answer.