🔍 LoRA Explorer

If you run Anima, you already know the pain this node exists to kill: base Anima is deliberately plain - the model card calls the default aesthetic "very plain and neutral" - so your whole look lives in LoRAs. And a LoRA filename tells you nothing. artist_lora_v3.safetensors could be a painterly style, a character, or the one that fought your whole prompt. 🔍 LoRA Explorer is a drop-in replacement for ComfyUI's built-in LoraLoader that shows you a preview image and the metadata on the node itself, before you ever hit Queue. It comes from the same author as the Anima Style Explorer node (FullLet), part of the discovery-tooling wave that arrived for Anima faster than it did for any previous anime base.

What it actually does

The loading mechanism is not clever, and that's the point. It loads the file and calls comfy.sd.load_lora_for_models with strength_model and strength_clip - literally the same call the stock LoraLoader makes. Swap it in and your graph behaves identically. What it adds on top:

• It reads the safetensors header for metadata and looks for a sidecar preview next to the LoRA (my_lora.preview.png), then hands that image and metadata back to the UI. No more squinting at filenames.
• Flip fetch_civitai on and, when there's no preview already, it computes the file's SHA256, asks Civitai if it knows that hash, and if there's a match it downloads a preview plus a .civitai.json sidecar for you. Hashing a multi-GB file is slow the first time - it's cached afterward in lora_hashes.json.

The inputs that matter

• model / clip - from your checkpoint loader, straight through to the sampler chain.
• lora_name - the dropdown of everything in your models/loras folder. It merges ComfyUI's index with a direct filesystem scan, so a LoRA you just downloaded shows up without a restart. Nice touch.
• strength_model / strength_clip - default 1.0, range −20 to 20. For Anima style LoRAs, start around 0.6–0.8; the model bleeds styles when you stack strong.
• fetch_civitai (optional, off by default) - the "go get the metadata and a preview from Civitai" switch.

Outputs are MODEL and CLIP, exactly like any LoRA loader - wire them into your positive/negative conditioning and sampler. Drop-in.

Installing it

ComfyUI Manager: search "Anima LoRA Explorer". Or the manual route:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/fulletLab/anima-loras-explorer.git

Restart ComfyUI. It shows up as 🔍 LoRA Explorer under loaders/lora explorer. There are no model downloads and no heavy dependencies - the only declared dependency is aiohttp, which ComfyUI already ships, so install is painless.

Where people get burned

The Explorer's remote Search Civitai tab starts behind an "Internet Access Required" opt-in gate, and nothing is fetched until you flip it - if the search tab just sits there, that's why. Search and info work with no API key, but downloads require a saved Civitai key, which lives in config.json inside the node folder (fine locally; don't commit it). And if you enable fetch_civitai and get nothing, it usually means Civitai has no record for your file's hash - the log line is [LoRA Explorer] No CivitAI data for hash…. The pack is built around Anima (the remote search filters baseModels=Anima), but the loader itself isn't picky - it'll happily apply any LoRA you point it at.