Load Image Queue (FIFO)

You know the ritual. You're browsing, you see a reference image, you save it, you find it in Downloads, you drag it into a Load Image node, you hit Run. Now do that six times because you're collecting style references. Load Image Queue (FIFO) exists to kill that whole loop - it's the ComfyUI half of send-to-comfyui, a browser extension + node pair that moves images straight from a right-click menu into your input folder, in order, without you touching anything.

The node itself won't do much alone. Its superpower is the pairing: right-click an image on any site, the extension uploads it to ComfyUI/input as web_image_<timestamp>.png, and this node picks it up. Enable the extension's Auto-Run on Send toggle and the whole workflow fires itself - right-click, image appears at the other end. For captioning a stack of scraped images or doing quick img2img experiments, it turns your browser into a live input device.

How it works

Load Image Queue (FIFO) isn't just "grab the newest file." It's a small state machine. On startup it records a session timestamp; on every run it looks at files in the input folder that are newer than that timestamp and unprocessed, sorts them by modification time, and serves them oldest-first. Send three images rapidly and you get Image 1, then 2, then 3, in the exact order they landed. Empty queue? It falls back to loading the absolute newest file, so a manual workflow that uses this node never breaks.

Two details in the source are what make it reliable in practice:

• Race-safe reads. Auto-Run can fire the instant the browser finishes uploading, while the file is still half-written or zero-byte. The node retries with backoff until the file size is stable and PIL fully decodes it - so you don't get a bogus "truncated image" error on a file that just landed.
• A sane IS_CHANGED. When the input folder is empty it returns a stable string instead of NaN, so ComfyUI doesn't spin in a re-run loop.

It also corrects EXIF rotation and converts to RGB, which quietly saves you from the "why is this web screenshot sideways" class of problem.

The inputs that matter

There's exactly one: reset_queue (boolean, default off). Toggle it on and the next Run clears the queue state and grabs the absolute latest file - handy when an offset has crept in (say, you sent images while ComfyUI was shut down). Run once to resync, toggle it back off, and normal FIFO order resumes. The node's display name is Load Image Queue (FIFO) - that's what you search for in the node menu, not "LoadLatestImage."

Output is a standard IMAGE tensor, so wire it into anything a normal Load Image feeds: a Preview, a VAE encode, a ControlNet preprocessor, whatever. It's a drop-in replacement for Load Image in any workflow where the file comes from your browser.

Installing it

This is one of the friendlier installs in the ecosystem. The custom node itself has zero extra Python dependencies - just torch, numpy, and PIL, all of which ComfyUI already ships - so there's no requirements.txt to trip over and nothing to pip. Clone it in:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/tardigrade1001/send-to-comfyui

Restart ComfyUI and search for Load Image Queue (FIFO). To get the other half working, load the extension folder as an unpacked extension via chrome://extensions → Developer Mode → Load Unpacked - Chrome or Edge only, and it assumes ComfyUI is on the default 127.0.0.1:8188. ComfyUI Manager can install the node side too, but it can't install a browser extension, so you'll end up in the extensions page regardless.

Gotchas

• Queue state is in-memory. Restart ComfyUI and the FIFO memory is gone - images from before the restart get treated as new files. That's by design, just don't expect persistence.
• Queue offset. If you send images while ComfyUI is down, they'll be picked up as a backlog before your newest send. That's what reset_queue is for.
• Auto-Run needs site access. The extension fires Run by injecting into your ComfyUI tab, and Chrome often defaults unpacked extensions to "on click" access, which silently breaks that. If you see "Cannot access contents of the page," go to the extension's Site access settings and switch it to On all sites. The upload can still succeed while auto-run fails, so check whether the image actually landed.
• If you get "No images found in input folder," nothing's been sent yet - send one from the browser, or drop a file into input/ manually.

It's a small niche tool with a small footprint, but for dataset or reference pipelines it removes a surprising amount of daily friction. Right-click → Send → Create, indeed.