PixlStash Character Loader

If you're using this pack for character work, this is the node that ties it together. PixlStash Character Loader picks a character from your vault - one that PixlStash has reference faces for - and hands a PIXLSTASH_CHARACTER handle to everything that needs to know who you're talking about. The Face Likeness Gate consumes it as the identity to score against, the Picture Saver uses it to tag results back to the right person, and the search nodes use it as a filter. Without it, character-based workflows in this pack don't have a vocabulary for "this character."

How it works

Same live-dropdown machinery as the other loaders: the list is fetched from your PixlStash server using credentials stored in ComfyUI Settings > PixlStash (URL + API token, verify-SSL toggle), never in the workflow JSON. Selections are encoded "CharacterName #id", and the node extracts the numeric ID server-side and emits it as an opaque PIXLSTASH_CHARACTER wire. Character is a first-class object in PixlStash, not just a tag - it carries reference faces and picture associations, and that's what the likeness features build on.

One version note from the README: the character picker needs PixlStash v1.2.1+, because it relies on an API addition in that release. If your dropdown stays stuck on "(loading…)", that's the first thing to check.

The inputs and outputs

• pixlstash_character (required) - the dropdown.
• pixlstash_project (optional) - wire a Project Loader to narrow the character list to one project.

Outputs: pixlstash_project and pixlstash_character (both pass-through).

What you wire it into

• Face Likeness Gate - the character is the reference: each generated frame is scored by face similarity to this character's reference faces, and frames below the threshold get rejected. This is the node that makes the gate actually useful for character consistency - generate with a character LoRA, gate on face likeness, upscale only the matches.
• Picture Saver - assigned pictures are linked to the character (and queued for face extraction, so they enrich the character's reference pool over time).
• Picture Loader, Semantic Search, Likeness Search - restrict what comes back to this character.

Install and gotchas

It's part of the nine-node pack, installed once: ComfyUI Manager → ComfyUI-PixlStash, or git clone https://github.com/Pikselkroken/ComfyUI-PixlStash.git into custom_nodes, then restart and set your URL/token in Settings > PixlStash. Dependencies are just requests and Pillow - no model downloads. It needs a running PixlStash server (the self-hosted image manager, formerly PixlVault, that this pack fronts) at v1.2.1+, and multi-user ComfyUI isn't supported - these nodes refuse to run under --multi-user rather than risk picking the wrong user's token.