Load InstantID Model

This node has one job: read a file off disk and hand it to whichever InstantID node needs it. There's nothing to configure and nothing clever going on - the entire node is a dropdown. Which is exactly why it's worth its own explainer: the dropdown starts out empty, and a beginner staring at zero options with no error message has no idea why.

How it works

InstantID's actual weights - the trained adapter that does the identity injection - live in a single checkpoint file that this node loads into memory as an INSTANTID object. Every InstantID node that patches a model (Apply InstantID, Apply InstantID Advanced, InstantID Patch Attention) needs this object as an input, so this loader is almost always the first InstantID-specific node in any graph, right after Face Analysis.

One naming wrinkle worth knowing so it doesn't throw you: the file you'll download is called ip-adapter.bin. That's not a mistake and it's not a real IP-Adapter checkpoint - InstantID's own weights are built on the same decoupled cross-attention architecture IP-Adapter uses, so the author kept the filename convention. It's InstantID, not IPAdapter, despite the name.

The input and output that matter

One input: instantid_file, an enum populated from whatever's sitting in your InstantID models folder. There's no default and no fallback - if the folder is empty, the dropdown is empty, full stop.

One output: INSTANTID, which you wire into the instantid input on any of the Apply InstantID nodes or InstantID Patch Attention.

Installing it

The node itself comes with the pack: search "ComfyUI InstantID (Native Support)" in ComfyUI Manager, or git clone https://github.com/cubiq/ComfyUI_InstantID into custom_nodes and restart.

The actual model file is a separate, manual download - this node doesn't fetch anything for you. Grab it from HuggingFace: InstantX/InstantID and place it in ComfyUI/models/instantid/. Create that folder if it doesn't exist yet; a fresh InstantID install usually doesn't have it. You'll also need the InstantID controlnet model from the same HuggingFace repo, placed in ComfyUI/models/controlnet/ - different node, but you'll be grabbing it at the same time so it's worth doing together.

Common issues

The dropdown is empty. This is the single most common first-run problem with this node, and it's not a bug - it means ComfyUI/models/instantid/ doesn't exist or has nothing in it. Create the folder, drop ip-adapter.bin in, and restart ComfyUI (a refresh in the browser isn't always enough to pick up a brand-new folder).

"I downloaded a model but it's not showing up." Check you actually put it in models/instantid/ and not models/ipadapter/ or models/checkpoints/ - easy mix-up given the confusing ip-adapter.bin filename, but InstantID's loader only scans its own dedicated folder.

Model loads but generation still fails. That means this node did its job - the failure is downstream. Check that Face Analysis has antelopev2 loaded correctly and that the controlnet model (a separate download, separate node) is also in place; InstantID's pipeline needs all three pieces present before anything generates.

Don't confuse this with a real IP-Adapter checkpoint. If you're also running ComfyUI_IPAdapter_plus in the same graph, keep the folders and the nodes straight - an actual IPAdapter model won't work here, and this file won't work in an IPAdapter loader, despite the shared filename convention.