Load Image (Pipe)

Every image loader eventually has to answer the same five questions: what are the pixels, where's the mask, how big is it, what's the file, and what generated it? Load Image (Pipe) answers all of them at once and hands you the answer as a single pipe. Same folder-source switcher as its plain sibling - input or output folder - but instead of two loose wires, everything about the loaded image travels down one PIPE output for Eclipse's pipe ecosystem to unpack.

What's in the pipe

The loader reads the file (Pillow, multi-frame aware, EXIF-transposed), derives a mask from the alpha channel when present, and then packs the whole picture into the pipe: image, mask, width, height, extracted generation metadata when the file has any, plus filepath, filename, and source_name (the filename without extension). That file identity trio is the quiet star - when a pipe carries provenance, a downstream save node can name its output after the source automatically, which is exactly the pattern the pack's Smart Folder and save nodes expect. If the PNG carries embedded workflow metadata - the ComfyUI convention where the image is the project file - this node reads it in, so a pipe-aware workflow can reconstruct or respond to what produced the image.

How it behaves

Two details are worth knowing. First, the folder switcher is a socketless widget (folder_source defaults to input; flip to output and the output_image dropdown takes over). Second - and this is the mechanism that keeps the node honest - the loader fingerprints the actual file (a SHA-256 of its bytes) on every run, which forces ComfyUI to reload when the file changes rather than serving a stale cached result. Drop a new file into that path and the node picks it up without a refresh dance.

Inputs: folder_source, image (the input-folder combo), output_image (the output-folder combo, default none). Output: the single pipe.

Where it fits

Pick this over the plain Load Image when you're working in pipes - feeding a Context node, a pipe-based sampler chain, or a save pipeline that wants full provenance. It's also the metadata-forward choice: the sibling "Load Image (Metadata Pipe)" node keeps the folder-source switcher but outputs bare image+mask and skips the pipe packing. Here, the metadata actually travels. One honest limitation carried over from the wider ecosystem: metadata extraction only works on files that still have it - a PNG that went through a re-encoding host or a screenshot has nothing to extract, and you'll just get empty fields plus the pixels.

Install

Part of ComfyUI_Eclipse:

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

Or install ComfyUI_Eclipse from ComfyUI Manager and restart. Standard pack dependencies, no models. If your workflow already thinks in pipes, this is the loader you want at the front.