Random Artist Picker (Image Saver)

A prompt-randomizer for style exploration. You keep a text file of artist names, and this node pulls one (or a few) at random each run and spits them out as a tag string you drop into your prompt. It's a slot machine for aesthetics - great for breaking out of a rut when every generation is starting to look the same.

It leans on a specific truth about anime models: on the Illustrious and NoobAI families (and Danbooru-trained models generally), artist names function as style tags. Because those models learned Danbooru's exact vocabulary, a tag like by artgerm or a booru artist handle nudges the whole image toward that artist's look, no LoRA required. NoobAI in particular leans hard on artist tags for its aesthetic. So a node that randomly samples from a curated artist list is a legitimately good way to discover styles you'd never have typed yourself. (Worth knowing the flip side: Pony stripped artist tags out, so this trick does little there, and natural-language models like Flux want prose, not tags.)

How it works

Point it at a text file of artist names, tell it how many to grab, and it randomly selects that many, formatting them into a clean prompt fragment. The formatting options exist because booru-style names are messy - underscores, parentheses, casing - and a raw dump breaks prompts.

The inputs and outputs

The essentials:

• file_path - path to your text file of artists. This is the whole show; no file, nothing to pick from.
• count (default 1) - how many artists to draw. One artist gives a clean style; blending two or three creates hybrids, sometimes muddy, sometimes magic.
• seed - controls the random draw. Fix it to reproduce a roll, randomize it to keep exploring.

The formatting knobs, all of which matter more than they look:

• replace_underscore (default true) - turns studio_ghibli into studio ghibli, which is what prompts actually want.
• escape_parens (default true) - escapes parentheses in names so they don't get read as ComfyUI attention-weighting syntax and wreck your prompt.
• delimiter (default , ) - what goes between multiple picks.
• weight_by_count - if your file carries usage counts, this biases the draw toward more-common artists instead of uniform random.
• prefix - text prepended to each pick (e.g. by to get by artgerm).
• exclude and filter - narrow the pool: drop names you don't want, or keep only ones matching a filter.
• trailing_comma (default false) - whether to leave a comma on the end for easy concatenation.

One output: tags (STRING) - the formatted artist string, ready to wire into your text encode or concatenate onto a base prompt.

How to install it

ComfyUI Manager: search "ComfyUI Image Saver", install, restart.

Manually:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/alexopus/ComfyUI-Image-Saver
cd ComfyUI-Image-Saver
pip install -r requirements.txt

then restart. No models to download - but note you supply your own artist list; the node doesn't ship one.

Common issues & troubleshooting

Empty output. Almost always the file_path - a wrong path, or a file the ComfyUI process can't read. Point it at a real, readable text file with one name per line.

Parentheses in a name break the prompt. Booru artist handles love parentheses, and unescaped they collide with ComfyUI's (tag:1.2) weighting syntax. Keep escape_parens on (it defaults on) and they'll be treated as literal text.

The artist tag does nothing. Check your model. Artist-as-style-tag is an Illustrious/NoobAI/Danbooru-lineage feature. On Pony (artist tags removed) or on natural-language models like Flux, a random booru artist name carries little to no weight - that's the model, not the node.

Same artist every run. A fixed seed reproduces the same draw by design. Set the seed to randomize (or use ComfyUI's randomize-after-generate) if you want a fresh pick each time.