Icy GLIGENLoader

IcyGLIGENLoader is the ComfyUI-IcyHider wrapper of core GLIGENLoader - same node, renamed class, no functional difference. And full honesty up front: GLIGEN is a piece of Stable Diffusion history, and this is the node where you're most likely to think "why is this even here?" So let's cover what it is, and when it's genuinely still useful.

GLIGEN (Grounded-Language-to-Image GENeration) was a 2023 approach to layout control: you place text-bound boxes on the canvas and the model is forced to draw that prompt's subject inside its box. In ComfyUI you pair the loader with GLIGENTextBoxApply, which attaches a prompt-plus-box to your conditioning. The GLIGENLoader just pulls the GLIGEN model file (from ComfyUI/models/gligen/) and hands you a GLIGEN object for the apply node to use. The gligen_name dropdown lists whatever .safetensors you've dropped in that folder.

Why it's a relic

Regional conditioning (ConditioningSetArea and friends, all also wrapped by this pack) took over the "place a subject in a region" job using the normal text encoder, and modern bases moved past GLIGEN entirely - it was built for the SD 1.5 era and there's no GLIGEN support for SDXL or later. The KB's character-consistency material is blunt about the modern state: SDXL-family models couldn't bind an attribute to a specific character through tags, and newer LLM-encoder models just do it from plain language, which is why regional tooling of all kinds faded.

When you might still use it

• You have a workflow built on SD 1.5 and a GLIGEN model, and it works for you.
• You're studying the history of layout control, or you specifically want the "grounded box" behavior GLIGEN gives you without fighting a regional-conditioning graph.

Otherwise, skip it. On a 2026 machine, the honest answer is that ConditioningSetAreaPercentage (or just a better base model) does this job with fewer moving parts and no extra model file.

Installing it

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/icekiub-ai/ComfyUI-IcyHider

Restart, or use ComfyUI Manager (search "IcyHider"). No pip dependencies; the GLIGEN model itself is a separate download into models/gligen/.

Common issues

• Missing node in shared workflows - install the pack or swap in core GLIGENLoader.
• "Loaded but nothing happens." GLIGEN only works on architectures that support it (SD 1.5-era). If your base is SDXL/Flux or newer, the loader may load the file while the model silently ignores it. That's a compatibility wall, not a settings problem.
• Model not in the dropdown. It belongs in ComfyUI/models/gligen/, and ComfyUI needs a restart to see new files.