RunningHub Load Image

Here's the thing that makes this one different from its four siblings: it's the only node in the whole pack that doesn't need a RunningHub API key. RunningHub Load Image just takes a URL, downloads whatever image is behind it, and hands it back as a ComfyUI IMAGE tensor. No credentials, no cloud job, no credit balance. It's the free utility hiding in marduk191/comfyui_qwen_runninghub, and it's genuinely handy.

What it's for

The other nodes in this pack - Image to Image, Image Enhancer, Image to Video - all want an IMAGE on their input. Normally that comes from a LoadImage node pointing at a file on your disk. But what if the image you want to work with lives somewhere online? A generated result on a CDN, a reference shot from a URL, an image a friend linked you. That's this node's job: you paste the URL, it fetches the bytes, decodes them with Pillow, and converts to the standard IMAGE tensor. From there it plugs into anything.

How it works

Under the hood it's a requests.get(url) with a raise_for_status() - meaning a non-200 response turns into an error rather than a silent garbage tensor. The image is decoded, converted to RGB, normalized to 0–1, and wrapped in a batch dimension so ComfyUI's IMAGE-typed inputs accept it. That's the whole mechanism, and it's the most honest node in the pack: no polling, no API, no hardcoded node IDs to drift out of sync.

The one input

• url - the direct link to an image, and it has to be a public URL the machine running ComfyUI can reach. localhost paths, file:// links, and anything behind a login will fail - this is a plain HTTP fetch, not a file reader.

Install

Same as the rest of the pack - and since this node is bundled with the four API nodes, you can't get it standalone:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/marduk191/comfyui_qwen_runninghub
cd comfyui_qwen_runninghub
pip install -r requirements.txt

Restart ComfyUI and it shows up under the "RunningHub" category. Dependencies are just requests, Pillow, numpy and torch - nothing exotic, no model downloads. If you use ComfyUI Manager, search the pack title; it isn't in the official Comfy Registry, so clone directly if Manager can't find it.

Troubleshooting

The failure modes are all networking, so they're easy to read. A 403 or 404 from raise_for_status means the URL is wrong, dead, or blocking bots - check that you have the direct image link (the .png/.jpg address), not a page URL. A timeout or connection error means the host is slow or unreachable from your machine. And remember the author's own caveat from the README: the pack as a whole is "untested as I have no access to runninghub. It might work, It might not." - this node is simple enough that it very likely does, but it's bundled with siblings that carry that risk.

Where it fits

Use it to feed remote images into the pack's other nodes without saving them locally first, or just as a general "download this image into the graph" convenience. If you already run a dedicated URL-loader pack you don't need it, but if you're in here for the RunningHub nodes anyway, it's a nice zero-cost add-on - and the only one that won't be charging you for the privilege.