Save WebP (Separate Meta)

WebP is the format your gallery wishes everything was. The pack's own source notes it's typically around 30% smaller than JPG at equivalent quality, so a folder of WebP output takes noticeably less disk than the same images as JPGs. There's one problem: WebP has no PNG text chunks, which has always made it a one-way door for ComfyUI metadata. Save as WebP and your workflow was gone, full stop. Save WebP (Separate Meta) is the door that opens back.

It's the WebP member of Kuroi961's Save-Separate-Metadata pack, and it does exactly what its JPG and PNG siblings do: write a clean image, then drop the workflow into a sidecar JSON matched by filename:

output/2026-05/image_00001_.webp
output/2026-05/.meta/image_00001_.json

That JSON carries the standard prompt and workflow payload - the same data ComfyUI's default SaveImage would embed in a PNG - so restore behaves the way you'd hope. Drag the WebP back onto the canvas and the extension looks up the sidecar and rebuilds the graph. Drag the .json if you're outside that lookup scope. Sidecar metadata takes precedence over embedded if both exist.

The inputs you'll touch: images, filename_prefix (the usual ComfyUI template - dates via %date:yyyy-MM-dd%, subfolders with a slash, auto-incrementing counter), and quality, a 1–100 slider defaulting to 90. That's the whole node. No outputs, because it's an output node; it sits at the end of your graph and does its thing.

Now, the "PNG is the master, WebP is a derivative" rule from the wider ecosystem still holds - PNG is the only format that natively round-trips a workflow, and lossy WebP is not your archive copy for pixels. What this node changes is that the derivative no longer loses its recipe. If you've been keeping a PNG master around only to preserve the workflow, this pack lets you archive a smaller WebP and restore from it directly, sidecar intact. That's the real argument for reaching for it.

Install is the pack's usual one-and-done routine: ComfyUI Manager, search "Save Separate Metadata", install, restart. Manual route:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/Kuroi961/ComfyUI-Save-Separate-Metadata.git

No pip dependencies, no model files.

The gotchas are shared with the rest of the pack. The sidecar must stay beside the image - external file moves orphan it, because only ComfyUI and the optional ComfyUI-Drawer gallery track the pair (Drawer also syncs sidecars on move/rename/delete and can index them for search). Dot-folders like .meta hide in some file managers, which reads as "metadata gone" until you remember to show hidden files. Same-stem collisions - an image.jpg and image.webp in one folder - share one sidecar, so avoid them. And ComfyUI launched with --disable-metadata won't write sidecars at all.

Verdict: this is the one I'd grab if I archive in lossy-but-small formats and still want every saved image to be able to rebuild itself. The web-friendly size with the workflow that doesn't die on the trip is a fair trade for keeping one extra JSON per file.