🔧 Image Batch To List

This is the other half of the batch/list problem. A batch is one tensor holding N images stacked together; a list is N images that flow through the graph separately, one at a time. ImageBatchToList takes the first and gives you the second - it unpacks a batched IMAGE into a list so that downstream nodes fire once per image instead of once for the whole stack.

Why you'd want that: ComfyUI runs list-mode nodes in a loop, once per item. So if you've got a batch of eight frames and you want a node to treat each one individually - score each with a separate prompt, save them under per-image filenames, run a node that only handles one image cleanly - converting to a list is how you get that per-item behavior. It's from ComfyUI Essentials, cubiq's pack of small utilities that fill gaps in core ComfyUI, and like most of that pack it's the kind of node you don't think about until a graph refuses to do what you meant.

How it works

No resizing, no math, no loss - it just slices the batch along its first dimension and emits each image as its own list element. The output is flagged as a list, which is the signal ComfyUI uses to switch into per-item execution for everything wired after it.

The inputs and outputs that matter

Dead simple, one in and one out:

• image (IMAGE) - your batch tensor.
• IMAGE (output, list) - the same images, now a list. Every node downstream now runs once per image.

That list flag is the important part. It changes execution semantics for the rest of that branch, which is exactly the point and also the thing that surprises people.

How to install it

ComfyUI Manager is the least-friction route: search ComfyUI Essentials, install, restart. Or clone it:

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

then restart. Nothing to download beyond the pack itself.

Common issues & troubleshooting

Everything downstream suddenly runs N times. That's not a bug, that's the feature. Once you're in list mode, ComfyUI executes each subsequent node per image - so a save node writes N files, a sampler runs N times, and so on. If you only wanted a single pass, you didn't want a list; keep the batch.

A node still only sees one image. Some nodes collapse a list back down or take only the first element by design. If per-item processing isn't happening, check that the node you're feeding actually declares a list-compatible input - not every node respects list mode.

It disappeared after updating. Essentials is maintenance-only as of April 2025, and users have reported individual nodes breaking against newer ComfyUI builds. Update the pack via Manager; if the node is genuinely broken by a Comfy change, rolling back to an earlier ComfyUI is the common fallback until (if ever) a fix is merged. To go the other direction - list back into a single batch - use its sibling ImageListToBatch.