Save Image (to Folder) (DEPRECATED)

Here's the whole story in one sentence: Save Image (to Folder) does exactly what its name says - dumps a list of images into a folder inside your output directory - and the ComfyUI devs marked it deprecated because plain old Save Image already does that. It's the most-searched node in this built-in image group, and the people landing here are mostly confused, because the thing they want is a feature of a node they already have.

What it is

The node takes an images input, a folder_name (default dataset), a filename_prefix (default image), and a mode combo with two options: overwrite or increment. It writes each image as a PNG into output/<folder_name>/, named <prefix>_00000.png, _00001.png, and so on. overwrite replaces files with the same name; increment appends a counter so nothing gets clobbered. That's the entire mechanism - it's a thin wrapper around the same get_save_image_path bookkeeping that every save node uses, with a folder on the front.

The reason to have a folder-into-output node at all is building training datasets. If you're collecting a hundred generations to caption and feed to a LoRA trainer, you want them in one clean folder rather than scattered across output/ by run. That's the workflow this was built for, and it does it fine.

Why it's deprecated

The deprecation is not a bug or a removal - the schema literally carries is_deprecated: true with a note that the node is "redundant and superseded by existing Save Image nodes where the target folder can be specified in the filename_prefix." Translation: Save Image's filename prefix accepts folder paths. Set Save Image's prefix to dataset/image and you get exactly what this node produces, plus PNG metadata embedding and %date% tokens that this node lacks.

So the modern move: use Save Image or Save Image (Advanced) with a folder in the prefix. The one thing this node still does that Save Image doesn't is let you pick increment mode without writing the counter syntax yourself - a minor convenience, not a reason to keep it around.

What to actually do

If you loaded a workflow containing this node, leave it be - it still runs. If you're building something new, don't reach for it. Wire images into a normal Save Image and type dataset/image into the prefix. When you want the dataset back, the matching loader is Load Image (from Folder) or Load Image-Text (from Folder) for the caption-paired version.

Where people get burned: the folder_name lives inside the output directory, not next to your output folder, and the node validates it - you can't .. your way out of output/ (the source explicitly blocks path escapes). And the mode semantics trip people: overwrite with the default prefix of image will happily replace image_00000.png from your last run, so if you're building up a dataset over multiple queues, switch to increment.

Getting it

It ships with ComfyUI core - newer addition, marked experimental, living in comfy_extras/nodes_dataset.py. No install, no model files. The warning to keep in mind is the one in its name: it's the deprecated path, and the ecosystem has already moved on.

The upside of all this: you don't need this node to do what it does, and knowing why it's deprecated teaches you the prefix trick that's genuinely useful across half the save nodes in ComfyUI.