Folder Loader - klinter

ComfyUI's built-in Load Image only sees files sitting in input/. Folder Loader - klinter is the escape hatch: point it at any folder path on disk and it loads every supported image in that directory as one batch tensor. If you've got a folder of reference shots, a dataset, or a pile of renders you want to run through the same pipeline, this is the node that gets you there without moving files into ComfyUI's input folder.

The only required input is folder_path, a plain string - and yes, it needs to be an absolute or valid path on the machine running ComfyUI, not relative. Two optional inputs give you control: image_load_cap limits how many images it reads (0 means no cap, all of them), and start_index skips the first N images. Both are handy when a folder has hundreds of files and you only want a slice, or when you're iterating through a dataset in chunks.

Mechanically it's simple and predictable: it lists the folder, keeps .jpg, .jpeg, .png, and .webp files, sorts them alphabetically, applies your skip/cap, then converts each to RGB and stacks them into one tensor. The single output is images. Because it sorts before slicing, start_index is deterministic - you can re-run a chunk-based workflow and get the same split every time. That's worth knowing if you're batching through a dataset in passes.

Gotchas are few but real. If the folder doesn't exist it raises a FileNotFoundError; if it exists but has no supported images you get a clear "No valid images found" error. Mixed file sizes in one folder become a mixed-size batch, and most downstream nodes expect uniform batches - so like the pack's FlexibleBatchImage, this is best fed into nodes that tolerate varied dimensions, or into folders you've already normalized. Also note: this reads raw paths, so on a remote/headless ComfyUI setup make sure the path is reachable from the server, not your browser.

Install is the pack standard: search "Klinter_nodes" in ComfyUI Manager, or cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes && git clone https://github.com/klinter007/klinter_nodes then restart. No extra dependencies, no model downloads. Keep ComfyUI current since the whole pack targets the newer node API.

If you live in datasets and reference folders, this is the node that stops you from manually dropping files into input/ for the rest of your life.