Load Image

The stock Load Image node in ComfyUI picks a file from a dropdown and hands you an image tensor. Load Image - the display name for the class awkwardly called "Load Image (Metadata Pipe)" - is Eclipse's version of that, with one genuinely useful addition: it can read from your output folder as well as your input folder. That's the feature, and it's a real one. Repurposing your last generation as the input to the next step - a img2img chain, a refinement pass, a comparison - stops requiring you to manually copy files into input/.

The folder-source switcher

A single folder_source dropdown (default input, and it's a socketless widget) decides where the file list comes from. Set it to input and you pick from ComfyUI/input/ via the image combo. Set it to output and the output_image combo takes over, listing files from ComfyUI/output/. Two dropdowns, one active at a time, each populated with the files found in its folder. If you want to feed a previous result back into the pipeline, flipping folder_source to output is the whole trick - no file shuffling.

How it loads

The loader uses Pillow's image-sequence iterator, so it handles multi-frame formats (animated GIFs, multi-frame TIFFs/PNGs) by stacking the frames into a single batch tensor. It applies EXIF transposition so rotation metadata is honored rather than ignored, converts to RGB, and - the detail that matters for compositing work - if the source has an alpha channel, it derives a mask from it (inverted, matching ComfyUI's mask convention, where opaque areas are represented as 0). No alpha means a blank 64×64 mask. Outputs are image and mask, exactly what you'd feed a VAE encode, a sampler, or a composite node.

A note on the name

Yes, "Metadata Pipe" is confusing, because the current node outputs plain image and mask - no pipe socket in sight. It's a naming hangover from an earlier design where this loader was metadata-centric (the header credits the comfy-plasma project for metadata-extraction code that this line of nodes grew out of). If you want the metadata actually extracted and carried, that's the other sibling in this pack, Load Image (Pipe), which packs image, mask, dimensions, file identity, and embedded generation metadata into a single pipe. This one is the plain loader with the folder-source switch.

Install

Part of ComfyUI_Eclipse:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/r-vage/ComfyUI_Eclipse

Or install ComfyUI_Eclipse via ComfyUI Manager and restart. Pillow and torch, both standard pack deps. Realistic use: build an img2img or upscale chain, set folder_source to output, pick the last rendered image, and the next run starts from it - the workflow-in-the-image convention at its most practical.