Load Latent Absolute

Latents are the invisible half of ComfyUI - the compressed image state that everything before the VAE decode works on. Most of the time you create them, sample them, decode them, and forget them. But once you start saving them - say, to reuse as a starting point for img2img or to keep the exact noise state of a great run - you need a way to get them back. Load Latent Absolute does that, with the twist its name advertises: it loads from an absolute path on your filesystem, anywhere, not from ComfyUI's sanctioned input/output directories.

The input and output

• path (STRING, required) - an absolute filesystem path to the latent file. That's it. One input, one job.
• Output: latent (LATENT), ready to wire into a sampler or whatever consumes latents.

The file it expects is a torch.save()'d dictionary containing a samples key - which is exactly what ComfyUI's own latent-save nodes and this pack's FastAbsoluteSaver produce (its latent sidecars are saved next to the media file with a .latent extension). If the file doesn't have a samples key, the node raises a clear error rather than handing you garbage.

The "absolute" part is the whole point

ComfyUI's stock latent loader only sees the output/ folder and a limited set of paths; this node deliberately breaks that. Pass it D:/datasets/my_project/latents/run_7.latent or /mnt/nas/runs/latents/run_7.latent and it reads from there directly. That makes it the natural companion to an absolute-path saver: a dataset or project pipeline that stores latents alongside its media in arbitrary folders can round-trip them without copying files into ComfyUI's directory tree.

What to watch for

• It insists on an absolute path. Relative paths are rejected at validation time with a message telling you so. If you're used to slapping in a filename and letting ComfyUI guess, this node won't.
• Missing files error loudly - a FileNotFoundError (red node), not a silent empty latent. That's a feature: better to know your path broke than to sample from nothing.
• Changes are detected by file. The node's IS_CHANGED watches the file's modification time and size, so editing or replacing the latent on disk is picked up on the next run instead of replaying a cached load.

Install

Part of ComfyUI-JSON-Dynamic. ComfyUI Manager → search JSON Dynamic Loader, or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/ethanfel/ComfyUI-JSON-Dynamic.git
# restart ComfyUI

No dependencies.

Verdict

A niche node for a specific workflow: if you save latents to arbitrary project folders (especially with FastAbsoluteSaver's sidecar files) and want to load them back by path, this is exactly what you need. If you live entirely inside ComfyUI's stock directories, you can probably skip it.