Load Combo From Image

Someone posts an image you love. The checkpoint, the VAE, the sampler, the scheduler - you want the exact same combo, not an approximation. Load Combo From Image is the node that pulls those dropdown-style values straight out of the image's embedded workflow metadata and hands them to your loaders.

It's part of comfyui-parse-image, the pack from shinich39 that reads settings baked into a PNG when it was generated. Its five sibling nodes cover ints, floats, strings, and booleans. This one covers the "combo" inputs: the dropdowns where you pick a model name, a sampler, a scheduler.

Why this one earns its keep

Combo values are the fiddly ones to reproduce by hand. A checkpoint name like realisticVisionV60B1_v51VAE.safetensors has to match character-for-character, and there's no way to guess it. This node's output type is * - a wildcard - so it plugs into any input that accepts a value, and the README's own examples show exactly what it's for:

• Load Checkpoint.ckpt_name - a titled loader node's model dropdown
• CheckpointLoaderSimple.ckpt_name - or the same node by its type name
• 1.ckpt_name - or by its node ID
• Load VAE.vae_name, VAELoader.vae_name - VAE picks
• KSampler.sampler_name, KSampler.scheduler - sampler and scheduler

Wire the wildcard output into a CheckpointLoaderSimple's ckpt_name, a VAELoader's vae_name, or a KSampler's sampler_name, and you get the exact option that image used.

How it works

Same mechanism as its siblings: feed it an image from a supported loader (stock LoadImage counts, plus LoadImageMask, Inspire's LoadImage //Inspire, Crystools' "Load image with metadata", and friends), and give it a query in <TITLE|TYPE|ID>.<WIDGET_NAME> format. It digs through the workflow JSON stored in the image and returns that widget's selected value.

The three inputs:

• image - from one of the supported loaders.
• query - the dotted path, e.g. KSampler.sampler_name.
• combo - a string fallback used when the query finds nothing. Defaults to empty.

The combo fallback matters more here than on the other siblings, because an empty string going into a model dropdown usually means "no model." If your query is right, you don't touch it; if it's wrong, you'll know instantly because your loader falls over.

Installing it

This pack is pure metadata parsing - no model downloads, no pip dependencies, no weights. Install via ComfyUI Manager (search "comfyui-parse-image") or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/shinich39/comfyui-parse-image

Restart ComfyUI and grab it from Add node > loaders > Load Combo From Image.

Common issues

Two things bite people. First, the value only works if the downstream node can actually use it: if the image references a checkpoint you don't have installed, the loader won't find it - the node returns the name faithfully, it just doesn't conjure models. Second, exact-match failures: if you always get the fallback, your query doesn't match the widget name in that image's workflow, or the image has no embedded metadata at all. Naming is strict - node title, type, or ID, a dot, then the widget name. Get it right and this is the most satisfying node in the pack: full recipe, zero typing.