Get List From File

There's a version of every ComfyUI user's workflow that starts with a plain text file full of prompts, names, or paths - and a moment where you realize the file's contents aren't the same as a list. Get List From File closes that gap: point it at a path, and it reads the file line by line into a proper list of strings you can iterate, shuffle, or index. It's the front door for a huge fraction of batch workflows, and it's about as simple as a node gets.

How it works

One input, one output:

• file_path - a full or relative path to a text file. Default is ./. This is a manual string input, so you type the path (or wire it from a node that produces one); there's no file browser built in.
• string_list (output) - the file's lines as a list, one string per line.

The behavior details matter more than the implementation: each line has whitespace stripped, and empty lines are dropped entirely. So a file with blank lines between prompts comes out clean - no empty-string entries gumming up your list downstream. That's a genuinely nice default, and it's also the thing to know if you ever want an empty string in the list; you can't have one.

The node re-runs on every workflow execution (its change detection is forced), so if you edit the file and re-queue, you get fresh contents. It's one of the more eager nodes in the pack that way - no caching surprises.

Where you'd actually use it

• Prompt batches: a prompts.txt with one prompt per line, loaded and piped into TinyBee's Decorate List (to add quality prefixes) and then into a per-line generation loop.
• Filename lists: feed it a list of paths, filter it with Filter Existing Files, and generate only what's missing - a classic "resume the batch" setup.
• Seed or LoRA lists: any one-entry-per-line data. Pair with Indexed Entry to walk the list one item at a time.

Installing it

This is part of ComfyUI-TinyBee (look for the 🐝TinyBee/Lists category once it's installed):

1. ComfyUI Manager → Install Custom Nodes → search "ComfyUI-TinyBee" → Install.
2. Restart ComfyUI.

Or manually:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/TinyBeeman/ComfyUI-TinyBee

Restart and you're done. No models to fetch, and the dependencies are effectively nil for this node - the pack's requirements.txt lists pillow and jsonata, but Get List From File is pure standard-library file I/O and touches neither.

Gotchas

Path resolution is the thing that'll bite you. ./ resolves relative to where ComfyUI is running (its working directory), not to your output folder, so a relative path like ./prompts.txt can silently point somewhere you didn't expect. When in doubt, use an absolute path, or wire the path from another node that already resolved it. Also remember the empty-line-stripping: if your file uses blank lines as intentional separators, they won't survive. And since the file is re-read every run, a half-written file (say, still being saved by another process) can produce a partial list - give it a beat before queuing.