Pipe Out Load Directory Settings

Batch workflows have a habit of being ugly. You load a folder of images, and the settings for that load - which directory, where to start, how many to take - get dragged across the graph in a handful of loose wires. This node is RvTools' answer: it's the unpack side of a pipe pair for exactly those three settings.

The "Load Directory Settings [RvTools]" node in the same pack (under Settings) collects three values and bundles them into one pipe: directory, start_index, and load_cap. "Pipe Out Load Directory Settings" is the mirror. Feed it the pipe and it hands you back the pipe untouched, plus those three values as clean individual outputs. That's the whole mechanism - look at the source and it's a three-line tuple unpack. No files are touched, no directory is scanned. This node never reads a folder; it just relays what the settings node told it.

So what are the three values you'll actually care about?

• directory (STRING) - the path to the folder you're loading images from.
• start_index (INT) - which image in the folder to begin with.
• load_cap (INT) - how many to load before stopping.

That trio is the classic "batch img2img on a folder of frames" control set: skip the first N, then take M. It's also useful if you're feeding frames into a video pipeline and want to limit how many get processed on one pass.

The pattern works because the pipe keeps the bundle intact while it travels. You can run the pipe through group boundaries, bypassed nodes, or into another Pipe In node that re-bundles it, and the three settings stay together. Only at the point of use - usually right before a Load Image / Load Images from directory node - do you split it open. If you've used rgthree's Context nodes, the idea is the same; RvTools just applies it to specific domain settings rather than to everything.

Installing it

It's part of ComfyUI-RvTools_v2. Via ComfyUI Manager, search "ComfyUI-RvTools_v2". Or manually:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/r-vage/ComfyUI-RvTools_v2

Restart ComfyUI after install. Dependencies (torch, numpy, Pillow, opencv-python, pilgram, pynvml, piexif) resolve automatically through Manager or the pack's requirements.txt. No models to download.

Where people get burned

• The pipe has to come from the right partner. This unpacker expects the exact three-value tuple from "Load Directory Settings [RvTools]". Wire in any other pipe - a project-folder pipe, a sampler-settings pipe - and the unpack throws a ValueError at execution time. The error is ugly but honest: it means the tuple shapes don't match.
• Deprecation context. The RvTools v2 pack itself is no longer maintained and the README points to the successor pack ComfyUI_Eclipse. The nodes work fine as installed, but new builds should check whether Eclipse ships the same pair before locking in on this one.
• No silent defaults. If directory comes back empty, it's because the settings node feeding the pipe was fed empty - this node won't guess a path for you.