RookieUI Load Asset Image

This is one of RookieUI's plumbing nodes - not something you'll usually place by hand, but the piece that makes the sidebar's img2img and inpaint uploads actually reach the ComfyUI graph. When you drop an image into RookieUI's Img2Img canvas, or use "Send to Img2Img" from a finished result, that image gets staged as a RookieUI-managed asset with an opaque handle. This node takes that handle and loads the image back out on the backend so the rest of the graph can use it.

RookieUI is an A1111-style sidebar for ComfyUI. Most of what you do happens in that sidebar; nodes like this one exist so the sidebar's upload UX has a clean way into native ComfyUI execution instead of round-tripping files through the input folder by name.

How it works

The node takes a single asset_handle - a string that points at an image RookieUI staged - and returns two things: the IMAGE, and a MASK derived from the image's alpha channel. So it's a little like the stock LoadImage, except keyed by a managed handle rather than a filename, and it hands you the alpha as a mask in the same step (useful when your source image already carries transparency you want to reuse as an inpaint region).

The image output wires into whatever comes next - a VAE encode, a ControlNet preprocessor, an img2img latent. The mask output wires into an inpaint encode or a ControlNet's mask input if you need it.

The inputs and outputs that matter

• asset_handle (string) - the only input, and normally you don't type it. The RookieUI sidebar fills it when you upload or hand off an image. If you're wiring the node manually you'd need a valid handle to a staged asset, which is why this node makes far more sense inside the sidebar flow than as a standalone LoadImage replacement.
• IMAGE output - the loaded picture.
• MASK output - the alpha channel as a mask. Ignore it if your image has no transparency.

That's the entire surface. It's deliberately minimal because its job is a handoff, not a transformation.

How to install it

It ships with the pack - you don't install it separately. Via ComfyUI Manager, search ComfyUI-RookieUI, install, restart. Manually, from your ComfyUI root:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/rookiestar28/ComfyUI-RookieUI
cd ComfyUI-RookieUI
python -m pip install -r requirements.txt

Then restart ComfyUI. The RookieUI sidebar tab appears in the frontend, and this node comes with it.

Common issues

The honest truth about this node is that it's not really meant to be dragged onto a blank canvas and wired by hand - without a live asset_handle from the sidebar, it has nothing to load. If you're trying to build a from-scratch img2img graph, the stock LoadImage is the node you want; this one is the sidebar's internal courier. Its search demand reflects that: almost nobody looks it up, because almost nobody interacts with it directly.

If an upload isn't reaching your graph from the RookieUI Img2Img panel, the usual culprits are a stale sidebar session or a handle that didn't persist across a host reload - re-uploading the image in the sidebar regenerates a fresh handle. And since the RookieUI sidebar keeps its own state, make sure you're on a current build of the pack; the asset-handoff path has seen fixes, so an old install can misbehave where a current one just works.