HTTP Image Loader

Stock ComfyUI can only load images from disk. HTTP Image Loader is the node that fixes that: give it a URL and it downloads the image and hands you a proper IMAGE tensor you can feed straight into img2img, ControlNet, a VAE, or anything else that eats images. And because it uses the pack's session/auth plumbing, it can fetch images that aren't public - from behind an API key, a bearer token, or a login cookie. That last part is the bit you can't do with a plain "Load Image from URL" node.

How it works

One required input: url. Then the useful optional ones:

• session / auth - wire in HTTP Session Manager and HTTP Authentication for protected images.
• headers / cookies - extra JSON-string headers or cookies, e.g. a Referer some image hosts require.
• timeout, verify_ssl, allow_redirects, proxy_url - the standard set.
• max_size (default 10 MB) - a hard cap on the download; bigger images are rejected rather than hogging memory.
• resize_mode - none, fit (fit inside target, preserve aspect), fill (fill target, may crop), stretch (distort to fit).
• target_width / target_height - the resize targets (default 512×512), only used when resize_mode isn't none.
• convert_mode - RGB, RGBA, L (grayscale), or auto. auto converts anything unusual to RGB.

Five outputs: image (the IMAGE tensor), width, height, format (the source format, e.g. JPEG), and info (a string describing what happened - check this one).

The honest caveat about failure

This node does not fail loudly. If the download fails, the URL 404s, or the image exceeds max_size, it returns a small black 64×64 fallback image with the error in the info output. Your workflow keeps running and silently produces a black image downstream - which is a nasty way to find out. Get into the habit of checking info (or format, which becomes "error" on failure) before you trust what you're feeding the sampler.

Install

ComfyUI Manager → search "ComfyUI-HTTP" → Install, restart. Manual:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes/
git clone https://github.com/wawahuy/ComfyUI-HTTP.git
cd ComfyUI-HTTP
pip install -r requirements.txt

No model downloads. Needs Pillow and torch, both already in any working ComfyUI install.

Where people get burned

Besides the silent-black-image trap: resizing only happens if you set resize_mode, so leaving it at none with target dimensions set does nothing. And max_size defaults to 10 MB - plenty for photos, but a 4K PNG from some sources will trip it, and the symptom (black image, info says too large) looks nothing like a download problem at first glance.