Local Image Loader

Stock ComfyUI's Load Image makes you pick from a flat list of filenames - fine until you have a few hundred images and no idea which is which. Local Image Loader replaces that with an actual gallery: a thumbnail browser that lets you walk your folders visually, preview full-size in a tab, and load whatever you click into the workflow as an IMAGE.

How it works

The node is mostly frontend. Its panel renders a masonry grid of thumbnails from the folder you've navigated into, with breadcrumb navigation, a parent-directory button, sorting by name/date/size, and pagination so a directory with a thousand images doesn't melt the UI. Double-click a thumbnail and it opens full-size in a new browser tab; click to load. It handles images (JPG, PNG, GIF, WebP) plus video and audio files for media workflows, and it remembers frequently used directories so your usual reference folder is one click away.

The metadata bit is quietly useful: for images generated in ComfyUI, it reads the embedded prompt and workflow data. That means browsing your own output folder is browsing a searchable history of what made each image - the "workflow included" culture baked into the PNG, surfaced at the loader instead of buried.

Inputs and outputs

This is a widget-driven node: no required inputs. The outputs are:

• image - the loaded IMAGE tensor, ready for img2img, ControlNet preprocessing, or VAE encode.
• info - a STRING with the loaded file's metadata/prompt info.

Where it fits

Reference-driven workflows. If you do img2img, style transfer, ControlNet, or just like to compare against a folder of past generations, this replaces the "remember the exact filename" tax with pointing at a thumbnail. It also shines for batch preview: load a stack of reference images, split the batch, and process.

Installing it

ComfyUI-KikoTools pack: ComfyUI Manager → "ComfyUI-KikoTools" → Install → restart, under ComfyAssets → Images. Manual:

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

Restart ComfyUI.

Gotchas

It browses the server's filesystem - the machine running ComfyUI - not your browser's. That trips up people running ComfyUI on a different machine or in Docker; the gallery shows what the server can see, so put your reference images somewhere the server has access to. The heavy UI also means it's not great on a tiny window; give the node panel room or the thumbnails get cramped. And info only has embedded prompt data for images that carried it - downloads and re-saves often strip it, leaving you a blank string rather than a broken node.