Ino Get Model Path As String

ComfyUI's model folders are easy to forget because you almost never touch them by hand - the loaders just know. But the moment you automate, you need the actual path on disk, and hardcoding it into a workflow is how you break it the day you move your install. Ino Get Model Path As String answers the question "where does ComfyUI keep its models of this type?" by resolving it live, so your workflow gets the right path no matter where ComfyUI lives.

It's part of the Ino Nodes pack from nobandegani, a one-input, one-output convenience node built on ComfyUI's newer V3 schema.

What it does

One input, model_type - a dropdown of the standard model categories (diffusion models, text encoders, VAEs, LoRAs, ControlNets, and the rest of the pack's known types). Pick one and the single output, path, is the absolute path to that model directory.

Under the hood it computes the path from ComfyUI's own folder_paths, the same registry the built-in loaders use: it takes the parent of the input directory and appends models/<type>. So if your ComfyUI install lives at D:/comfy, choosing "vae" gives you D:/comfy/models/vae, and if you move the whole install tomorrow, the node gives you the new path automatically. That's the entire value proposition: the path is derived, never hardcoded.

Where it earns its place

Any workflow that talks to the filesystem outside ComfyUI's normal "pick a file from a dropdown" flow. Wire path into a string-concat or path helper to build a full file path for a node like Ino Get File Hash or Ino Get Last File. Use it with the pack's download nodes to double-check where a download actually landed. Or feed it into a file-counting node to verify a model directory is populated before you try to load from it.

It's also quietly useful for debugging: if a load keeps failing with a "file not found" that you can't explain, run this node for the model type and you'll see exactly which folder ComfyUI is looking in - usually the moment the mismatch becomes obvious.

The honest caveat: this node returns a directory path, not a file. If you need a specific model file's path, you still have to append the filename yourself. And it's a passive lookup - nothing here checks that the folder exists, so an empty or uncreated directory still "returns" its path happily.

Installing it

It ships with the whole Ino Nodes pack. ComfyUI Manager: search "ComfyUI Ino Nodes", install, restart. Or manually:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/nobandegani/ComfyUI-InoNodes.git
cd comfyui_ino_nodes
pip install -r requirements.txt

Restart after. Pack-wide caveats apply: it's built on ComfyUI's V3 schema (README wants v0.18.1+), and requirements.txt installs inopyutils, the helper library every node imports.

Common issues

There's very little to break here, but two things to keep in mind: the path is absolute and OS-specific, so if you share a workflow with someone on a different machine, the string they see will differ - that's normal and intended. And the dropdown only lists the pack's known model types; an unusual custom folder won't appear in it. Search "Ino Get Model Path As String" in the node menu (grouped under InoModelHelper).