Vae Select

Grey, washed-out, desaturated images are the classic "your VAE isn't loaded" symptom. And when the fix involves typing vae-ft-mse-840000-ema-pruned.safetensors from memory into a VAE Loader, people just live with muddy colours. Vae Select (class PgVAESelect) is the two-second version: a dropdown of every VAE ComfyUI can see, one click, done.

It's part of PG Nodes by Piotr Gredka (GizmoR13) - a small, MIT-licensed utility pack, self-published after the author started learning ComfyUI and decided his workflows needed fewer scattered knobs. The Select suite is the pack's plumbing department: dropdowns that hand a model filename to whatever loader you point them at. Vae Select is one of those, tuned for the VAE folder.

Why you'd reach for it

A VAE converts between the latent space the diffusion model actually works in and the pixels you see. Some checkpoints bake their VAE in - SDXL and Flux ship their own - but plenty don't, and SD 1.5 in particular needs vae-ft-mse-840000-ema-pruned bolted on or your output comes out flat and lifeless. So "which VAE file" is a decision you make per checkpoint, per run, and it's a long filename you should never have to type.

There's a subtler reason to reach for it in 2026: people now swap VAEs deliberately, not just to fix washed-out colour. The current drama is that some models' default decoders over-smooth the image - the Qwen-Image VAE gets blamed for mushy texture and weak contrast, and the community's fix is dropping in a different decoder (the Wan 2.1 VAE is the usual candidate). A dropdown makes that swap a trial-and-error exercise of two clicks instead of a filename hunt, which is exactly what you want when you're A/B-testing decoders.

How it works

Like the other Select nodes, it queries ComfyUI's folder_paths registry at startup - trying the vae, vaes and autoencoder keys so it works regardless of what other packs call the folder - and materializes the dropdown once. Its process() function does one thing: pass the chosen filename straight through. No loading, no decoding, no VRAM spent. The node doesn't load a VAE, it just tells you (and your loader) which one to load.

The input and output that matter

One input, one output, both named vae_name. The dropdown lists whatever lives in your ComfyUI/models/vae/ folder; the output is the filename string.

Wire that output into the vae_name input of a VAE Loader, or into the VAE slot of PG Nodes' Unified Loader, and you're set. Swap checkpoints, come back, pick a different VAE from the same dropdown - no retyping.

Installing it

No extra dependencies, no models to download from the pack. Either:

ComfyUI Manager → search "PG Nodes" → Install → Restart

or manually:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/GizmoR13/PG-Nodes
# restart, then search "Vae Select" under PG/Select

Your VAE files go in ComfyUI/models/vae/.

Where people get burned

The dropdown is populated once, at startup - drop a new .safetensors in and it appears only after you refresh or restart. The plain PgVAESelect has no "none" option; if you need an off position for the Unified Loader, that's the "Vae Select (Uni)" variant.

The bigger trap is one no dropdown can fix: a VAE from the wrong architecture. Latent channel counts differ between model families - SD 1.5 and SDXL sit at 4, Flux and Wan at 16 - and crossing them gives you noise or flat colour, not a subtly worse image. Use this node to make picking the right VAE effortless; it can't save you from picking one that doesn't belong to your checkpoint's family. When in doubt, the checkpoint's own docs (or the workflow you downloaded) name the VAE it expects.