Preview Image By Url (2lab)

PreviewImageByUrl (2lab) is the network-flavored cousin of the pack's PreviewImageByPath. Where that one shows you images from your filesystem, this one fetches images from the internet. You hand it a list of URLs, it downloads them, and they appear in the ComfyUI preview window. No outputs, nothing else - it's a pure "show me this" terminal node.

The workflow fit is narrower but genuinely useful. Reference images hosted on image boards, avatar URLs from an API, result thumbnails a service handed back to you, a dataset where the images are stored remotely - this is the node that lets you look at them without first downloading them to your input folder by hand. It also plays nicely with the LLM side of things, since several API services return image URLs as their output; you can wire a URL list straight in and eyeball what came back.

How it works

One required input:

• image_urls - a LIST of URLs. Give it one or many; the node fetches and displays each one.

No outputs - it's flagged as an output node and its entire purpose is the preview window. If you need the fetched pixels inside the graph (to img2img from a remote image, say), this node won't do it; you'd want a node that downloads to disk or streams into an IMAGE tensor, then load that.

Two honest caveats. First, it needs network access, and ComfyUI's server does the fetching - so the request comes from your machine, and anything that blocks remote requests (a firewall, a proxy, a hosted instance that restricts outbound traffic) will break it. Second, the small security thought: this node fetches arbitrary URLs supplied as text. That's fine on your own box with URLs you chose, but the ecosystem has a well-earned wariness of remote-fetching nodes on shared or exposed instances - an untrusted URL can hit internal addresses or leak that the fetch even happened. Local, single-user, trusted workflow: no problem. Don't feed it URLs from strangers on a server you don't control.

Installing it

Part of AI2lab/comfyUI-tool-2lab. ComfyUI Manager → search comfyUI-tool-2lab → Install → restart, or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/AI2lab/comfyUI-tool-2lab

Restart ComfyUI after. No models, no dependencies - the pack is a Chinese dev's collection of small utilities, README one word long, nodes labeled in 中文. If your images are on disk, use the path version; if they live behind URLs, this is the one.