Load PhotoMaker Model

Load PhotoMaker Model is one of the oldest identity-preservation loaders in ComfyUI - the experimental PhotoMaker nodes landed in January 2024, and they're still marked experimental today. PhotoMaker was the approach that took a handful of photos of a person and let you generate new images of that specific person in new scenes and styles, without training a LoRA. It's the ancestor of the whole "ID from reference images" family that later produced InstantID and PuLID, and if you're exploring that lineage, this loader is where it starts.

How it works

PhotoMaker's trick is an identity encoder. You feed it several reference images of the subject, it compresses them into a single identity embedding, and that embedding gets injected into the generation so the output looks like the reference person while your text prompt controls everything else - outfit, pose, setting. The loader's job is narrow: read the PhotoMaker model file from models/photomaker/ and initialize that ID encoder.

The single input is photomaker_model_name, listing files in models/photomaker/. The single output:

• PHOTOMAKER - the loaded ID encoder, which goes into PhotoMakerEncode.

The encode step

This is where the identity actually gets in. PhotoMakerEncode takes the PHOTOMAKER model plus:

• image - one or more reference photos of the person
• clip - your CLIP model
• text - the prompt, defaulting to photograph of photomaker

…and outputs CONDITIONING you can plug into the sampler. That text field is the injection point: the reference images are tagged into the prompt, so the prompt describes what you want while the images supply who it is. This is also why the classic PhotoMaker workflow prompt reads like photograph of photomaker plus whatever scene you're after.

Where it fits now

The honest read on PhotoMaker in 2026: it works, it's in core, but the identity-preservation field moved on. IP-Adapter FaceID, InstantID, and PuLID all landed after it with better identity fidelity and less prompt-hijacking, and the community consensus now is that the whole "adapter that injects identity" approach is itself being displaced by instruction-driven editing. If you're resurrecting an old PhotoMaker workflow, this loader is fully functional and needs nothing installed. If you're starting identity work fresh today, InstantID and friends are the better starting point - but they're all built on the same intuition PhotoMaker shipped first, and seeing it in the raw is a good way to understand what they're doing under the hood.

One practical note: it's SDXL-era tech and experimental by its own flag, so expect occasional rough edges, and make sure the checkpoint you pair it with is one PhotoMaker supports - this is not a "load anything" adapter.