Premium Image Gen 🔑 (Pollinations)

Premium Image Gen 🔑 is the free Image Gen node's older, better-dressed sibling. Same Pollinations service, same URL-based generation, one crucial difference: it hits the models that cost real money to run - OpenAI's gptimage and the kontext editor - so Pollinations wants something in return. Not money, at least not directly. An auth tier.

How it works

The mechanism is nearly identical to the free node: it builds a URL against image.pollinations.ai/prompt/{prompt} with your width, height, seed, and toggles as params. The difference is an Authorization: Bearer header carrying your API token, and a model list that needs authentication to exist at all:

• gptimage - advanced image generation with better prompt understanding. Requires "flower tier" access.
• kontext - professional image-to-image editing. Requires "seed tier" access.

Tokens and tier requests live at auth.pollinations.ai. Sign up, request the tier for the model you want, and paste the resulting token into the node. That's the whole setup - it's a few minutes of form-filling, not a credit card.

Inputs that matter

• api_token - paste it once. The node checks this before doing anything else.
• prompt - default is "a beautiful landscape"; you'll change it.
• model - gptimage for straight generation, kontext for anything that touches an existing image.
• width / height - 64 to 2048, step 64, default 512. The premium range starts lower than the free node's 512 floor and tops out at 2048 rather than 4096.
• count - 1 to 4 images per run, seeds incrementing like the free node's batch.
• transparent (optional) - transparent-background generation. Only actually sent when the model is gptimage.
• enhance - on by default; note it only applies to gptimage. Kontext does its own thing.

Outputs: images, urls, and prompts (the prompt that actually ran, post-enhancement).

Why you'd bother

The free flux node is fine for thumbnails, but gptimage is a genuinely better generator - cleaner prompt following, more coherent detail, a step up you notice. If you've hit the ceiling of the free tier and want OpenAI-grade image quality inside your ComfyUI graph without renting a GPU to run a local model, this is the cheap path. The pack's author clearly believes the tiers are worth it; the premium docs are the most detailed part of the repo.

Install & setup

Same install as the rest of the pack - ComfyUI Manager, or clone and pip install -r requirements.txt (only requests and pydub; no models). Then:

1. Get a token from auth.pollinations.ai.
2. Request the tier you need (flower for gptimage, seed for kontext).
3. Paste the token into the node's api_token field.

Common issues

• "API token required" immediately - you left the token field empty. Fill it.
• 401/403 - the token is wrong or expired. Regenerate it at auth.pollinations.ai.
• A "higher tier" message - your account isn't on the tier that model needs. Upgrade the request, not the token.
• Empty token black placeholder - if the check somehow passes with a blank token, you'll get the same black-512px-with-error-in-urls behavior as the free node. Check the urls output for the real message.

The premium ecosystem is newer and thinner than the free one - tier access is granted by request, so expect a little friction the first time. Once it's in, it's as easy as the free node, just with better results.

Need to feed an existing image in? That's Premium Image Edit 🔑, the kontext-powered img2img side of this node.