Load Image From Local Path

Stock ComfyUI's LoadImage node is a dropdown: it expects the file to already be sitting in ComfyUI's input/ folder, uploaded through the browser, and picked by filename. That's fine when a person is clicking around the UI. It falls apart the moment you're driving ComfyUI from a script or a backend service and the image you want to load already exists somewhere else on the filesystem - a shared volume, a scratch directory another process wrote to, wherever. LoadImageFromLocalPath skips the dropdown entirely and just takes a full path.

It's part of comfyui-easyapi-nodes, lldacing's pack aimed at people running ComfyUI through its API rather than by hand, and it's the natural counterpart to this pack's SaveImagesWithoutOutput / SaveSingleImageWithoutOutput nodes - save a file to a path with one of those, then read it back with this one, chaining processing steps through the filesystem instead of keeping everything in memory as base64.

How it works

Give it a path, it opens the file and decodes it the same way ComfyUI's own image loader does - you get an IMAGE tensor and, if the source file carries alpha, a MASK derived from it, same convention as the built-in LoadImage node.

The inputs and outputs that matter

• image_path (STRING, default empty) - the full path to the image file on disk, exactly as the executor's filesystem sees it. There's no browse/upload widget here; you type or wire in the path directly.
• Output: IMAGE - the decoded image, ready for anything downstream that expects an IMAGE.
• Output: MASK - derived alpha mask, same as stock LoadImage.

How to install it

Through ComfyUI Manager, searching comfyui-easyapi-nodes. Manually:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/lldacing/comfyui-easyapi-nodes.git
cd comfyui-easyapi-nodes
pip install -r requirements.txt

Restart ComfyUI afterward. No models to fetch - it's a file reader, nothing more.

Common issues & troubleshooting

"File not found" even though the file is right there. The path has to be correct from the perspective of the machine actually running ComfyUI, not your own laptop. If you're running on a remote GPU or a serverless executor, "the file is right there" on your side means nothing - the image needs to already be on that machine's disk at that exact path before the node runs, which usually means it got there via a mounted volume, an upload step earlier in the same pipeline, or a save node writing it there moments before.

Works locally, breaks on a hosted/serverless setup. This is the single biggest gotcha with this node specifically. A serverless ComfyUI executor typically starts each run in an isolated environment - there's no guarantee an arbitrary local path from a previous run, or from your own machine, still exists. If you're not running your own persistent ComfyUI install with a fixed filesystem, base64 in via Base64ToImage, or a URL-based loader, is usually the more portable choice than a hardcoded local path.

Mask looks wrong or empty. Same behavior as stock LoadImage - if the source file has no alpha channel, the derived mask won't carry any meaningful transparency data. That's expected, not a bug in this node.