LoadImage_motorway_edition

Every ComfyUI workflow starts somewhere, and for a huge number of them it starts with loading an image. LoadImage_motorway_edition is the Motorway-pipe version of that first step: pick a file from your input folder and it lands the pixels in the pipe under an IMAGE key, plus any alpha channel as a MASK key, instead of dangling a pair of wires out of the node.

This is the node you reach for at the top of an img2img workflow, a face pass, or anything where a picture is the seed of the pipeline. The Motorway pack is all about collapsing the rat's nest of wires into one pipe that carries everything by name, and this is the on-ramp: after this node, your image lives at a known key, and every downstream motorway-ed node that needs "the image" just reads that key.

The wrapper

Because the core LoadImage node's only real input is the file dropdown (a widget, not a tensor), this wrapper is lighter than most clones:

• image - the file dropdown. It lists images from your ComfyUI input folder; upload happens the usual way.
• OUTPUT_IMAGE_key (default IMAGE) - where the loaded pixels land in the pipe.
• OUTPUT_MASK_key (default MASK) - where the alpha channel (as a mask) lands. No alpha in the file? You get an empty mask, which is fine.
• MOTORWAY 🚌💨 - marked optional in the schema, but connect it anyway: the wrapper still needs a pipe to write the output keys into, and without one you'll get an unhelpful error.

The only output port is the pipe. To actually see the loaded image, pull the IMAGE key back out with a Motorway AxB ramp and feed it to a preview node.

Installing

It's part of the Motorway pack:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/agilly1989/ComfyUI_agilly1989_motorway
# restart ComfyUI

Or ComfyUI Manager → search ComfyUI_agilly1989_motorway → Install. No model downloads, no extra pip dependencies.

Gotchas

• Start the graph with a MotorwayStart node (or a primitive like MotorwaySeed) so there's a pipe to write into.
• Keys are exact strings. If a downstream node reads IMAGE but you changed the output key, it'll hit Key: 'IMAGE' doesn't exist in motorway.
• The dropdown reads your input folder, not output - if the file isn't showing, that's where to check (or click the upload icon).
• Beta pack: the author's README says "CURRENTLY IN ACTIVE DEVELOPMENT (BETA)! IF THINGS BREAK ITS BECAUSE I BROKE IT," and the generated clone nodes have been toggled off in some releases. Missing from the menu after install? That's the beta.

If you're building a Motorway workflow, this is usually the first node that isn't a start node. Load once, reference everywhere.