RC Preview Image (No Metadata)

Every ComfyUI user has done this: you want to eyeball the result of some adjustment halfway through your graph, so you drop in a Save Image node, run it, check the output, and then spend the next hour deleting a pile of throwaway PNGs from your output folder. RC Preview Image (No Metadata) is the cleaner version of that habit. It shows you the image inline, writes nothing permanent, and hands the tensor straight through so the graph keeps running.

It's a small node, but it does three things the stock Save Image doesn't: it writes to ComfyUI's temp folder instead of your output directory, it strips the prompt and workflow metadata from whatever preview it does create, and it passes the images through as an output so it can sit in the middle of your graph rather than only at the end.

How it works

The source is basically RC Save Image (No Metadata) with two tweaks: the output directory is the temp folder and the save is marked as temp, and the function returns the input tensor along with its UI result. So you get a visible preview in the node graph, and the image data flows onward to whatever node comes next. Same metadata-stripping behavior as its save sibling - the temp PNG has pnginfo=None, no prompt, no workflow.

The inputs that matter

Just one: images. Feed it an IMAGE tensor, get the same images back out. No filename to fiddle with, no prefix to type - which is the point. It's a probe, not a destination.

How to install it

Part of the RC Image Compositor pack:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/kj863257/ComfyUI_RC_Image_Compositor
cd ComfyUI_RC_Image_Compositor
pip install -r requirements.txt

Then restart ComfyUI. Or use ComfyUI Manager and search "RC Image Compositor". Only dependency worth mentioning is opencv-python, which you almost certainly already have in your environment.

Common issues

Two things to know before you wire this in everywhere. First, "preview" here means the standard ComfyUI image display - it's not a magnifier or a before/after comparison. If you need to compare source vs. result, look at the pack's RC Preview Image (Transfer Metadata) node, which displays two thumbnails side by side.

Second, and this trips people up: because it's a temp save with a random suffix on the filename, it won't show up in your normal output folder. That's the feature, not a bug - but if you were hoping to grab that file for later, you can't rely on it persisting. Use the actual save node for anything you want to keep.