KIE Seedream 4.5 Edit

You've got an image you mostly like and one thing you'd change - the background, the outfit, a dumb prop in the corner. Regenerating from scratch is a lottery. That's the case this node exists for: it hands Seedream 4.5 your source image (or images) plus an edit instruction, and you get a modified version back instead of a re-roll.

The KIE pack is a set of thin clients for the Kie.ai API, and this is the editing half of its Seedream pair. Seedream itself is ByteDance's closed image family - no weights on your disk, everything runs in the cloud and eats credits. If that rubs you wrong, fair; if you need prompt-driven editing without babysitting an inpainting mask locally, this is a genuinely comfortable way to get it.

How it works

Under the hood it's the same job lifecycle every generation node in this pack shares. The node uploads your image batch, fires a createTask request with the prompt and Seedream 4.5 edit model id, then polls recordInfo every 10 seconds until the job succeeds or fails. Image jobs default to a 300-second timeout, and transient API errors (429, 5xx, "internal error") get retried automatically. When it finishes, the result is downloaded and returned as a normal ComfyUI IMAGE tensor.

The inputs that matter

Three of them, really:

• prompt - your edit instruction. Say what changed, not just what it is: "turn the background into a rainy neon street" beats "edit this". With multiple reference images, be explicit about which is which.
• images - the source. This is a batch input, and the pack uploads all of them (up to 14), so you can feed multiple angles of the same subject as references, not just a single edit target.
• quality - basic or high. Basic is faster and cheaper for iterating; flip to high for the keepers. aspect_ratio (default 1:1) sets the output canvas, and the full list runs 1:1, 4:3, 3:4, 16:9, 9:16, 2:3, 3:2, 21:9.

The single output is image, which wires into anything that takes an IMAGE - a preview, a saver, an upscaler, or one of the pack's own I2V video nodes if you want to animate the edit.

Installing

The whole pack installs at once. ComfyUI Manager: search "ComfyUI Kie API", install, restart. Or by hand:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/gateway/ComfyUI-Kie-API
# then restart ComfyUI

No model downloads, no heavy dependencies - these nodes are API clients, not local inference. The one thing you actually need is a Kie.ai API key in ComfyUI/custom_nodes/ComfyUI-Kie-API/config/kie_key.txt (copy it from kie_key.example.txt). No key file and every node in the pack errors out before making a request.

Where people get burned

The "KIE API key not found" error is the #1 first-run wall - check that kie_key.txt actually exists and isn't empty. If a job submits but fails or drags, head to kie.ai/logs and look at the task record; the pack logs each state change to the console, so the failure reason is usually right there. Editing is also credit-hungry at high quality, and it's easy to blow through a balance iterating - run the pack's Get Remaining Credits node first and treat high quality as the finish, not the draft.