Neons Gallery Capture

The Save button on the Neons Style Explorer panel is the nicest way to fill a style gallery. It's also useless at 3am, in the middle of a 400-prompt crawl, on a box you aren't looking at. Neons Gallery Capture is that button as a node: image in, thumbnail filed under a style, image passed straight back out. The pack's manual calls it the headless equivalent of Save, and that's exactly the scope.

What it does

You give it a decoded IMAGE, a style_name and a mode. If the mode allows it, the image gets thumbnailed and written as a JPEG next to the catalog's previews for that style - 512 px on the long edge, which is why a fully covered catalog is tens of megabytes rather than gigabytes. The image comes back out unchanged on the image output, so you can drop the node into a chain between VAE Decode and Save Image without rewiring anything around it. The second output, saved_file, is the filename it wrote.

It's an output node, which matters more than it sounds: ComfyUI works backwards from output nodes when deciding what to execute, so this one runs even when nothing downstream consumes its outputs. That's what lets it work as a pure side-effect at the end of a graph.

The inputs that matter

• image - the required IMAGE. Whatever you'd otherwise send to Save Image.
• style_name - the required string, empty by default, and the input people get wrong.
• mode - first, always or off. first is the default and the one you want in a loop: it saves only when that style has no preview yet, so re-running a covered batch doesn't pile up shots. always files every run - pair it with a crawl when you're deliberately filling the gallery. off mutes the node without deleting it from your workflow.
• prompt - optional, and a forced input, meaning there's no box to type in; you wire it. The reason becomes obvious once you do: connect the positive output of a Neons Style Explorer into it and every shot remembers the prompt that produced it (up to 600 characters, stored in the gallery manifest).

The style_name gotcha

Only the first comma-separated token of style_name is used, and it goes through the catalog lookup before being stored - so a real style name works, and so do aliases, including the old [Clio] names that were relabelled [v2]. That lookup is also what keys the file: previews are stored against the style's stable id, so renaming an entry later never orphans its images.

Paste a whole prompt in there and only the chunk before the first comma is read. If that chunk isn't something the catalog resolves, the shot is filed under a key derived from the literal text you typed, which won't line up with any card in the browser. So: a name, never a clause. And if style_name is empty or None, the node quietly does nothing and returns an empty saved_file.

Outputs and how you use them

image is a passthrough - wire it onward to Save Image or leave it dangling, since the node fires regardless. saved_file is your health check: a growing gallery should give you a non-empty string every run, and an empty one isn't an error, it's the node telling you it decided not to file this one. The two usual reasons are mode and a style_name that didn't match.

The loop this exists for: Explorer → CLIP Text Encode → KSampler → VAE Decode → Gallery Capture → Save Image, with the Explorer's positive also wired into prompt on the capture node. Crawl on, crawl_missing_only on, queue a few hundred, come back to a gallery that filled itself.

Install

It ships in the Neons Style Explorer pack, so it installs with it. ComfyUI Manager → search Neons Style Explorer → install → restart ComfyUI. Or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/Neon-Sparks/ComfyUI-NeonsStyleExplorer

No separate dependencies; it runs on the Pillow and numpy ComfyUI already has. Restart the ComfyUI process after installing or updating, not just the browser - the pack's HTTP routes only exist after a restart, and previews are served through them.

Where people get burned

Previews are per catalog, and the pack supports several named ones - one per model, or per client project. Each has its own gallery, favourites and recents while the style texts stay shared, so if shots seem to be going missing, check which catalog is active in the browser toolbar first.

And the gallery ships empty. Nothing is bundled with the pack, so a fresh install showing blank cards isn't a broken install - it's the starting line.