Status Bar Overlay

When you're about to post a batch of generations, the last thing you want is to be squinting at six nearly identical images trying to remember which one used which seed. Status Bar Overlay is the dumb-but-handy node that bakes a colored bar and some text straight into the top of an image, so your note lives in the file itself instead of in your head.

It's the simplest node in the ComfyUI-StatusBarOverlay pack, and the one that stands alone best. You feed it an IMAGE, type some text, pick colors, and get the same image back with a labeled bar across the top. That's the whole job - no model, no API, no key, no weights to download. The pack's only declared dependency is Pillow, which ComfyUI already ships, so there's no dependency adventure here either.

How it works

Under the hood it's about a dozen lines of Pillow. For every image in the input batch it fills the top bar_height pixels with bar_color, then draws status at x/y with text_color, and returns the same-size batch back, just annotated. Two implementation details are worth knowing because they bite:

• Alignment. align is left, center, or right. center centers the text on the image width, right pins it to the right edge, and x is the offset from that anchor. Default is left at x = 8.
• The font. The node tries arial.ttf first and silently falls back to Pillow's tiny default bitmap font if it can't find it. On a lot of Linux setups there is no arial, so you'll get cramped, ugly text until you set font_path to a real .ttf/.otf - then the same font_size suddenly looks right.

Colors must be six-digit hex like #FFFFFF. Anything else raises an error, and that's the one thing that'll stop a workflow cold.

The inputs that matter

Most defaults are fine as-is. The ones you'll actually touch:

• status - the literal text to draw (default "status"). Plain string, no variables. If you want per-image info like seed and cfg stamped on a whole sweep, that's what the batch sibling in this pack is for.
• bar_height (default 30) and font_size (default 18) - nudge these together; a 30px bar with 18px text is comfortable.
• font_path - the one to set when text looks wrong.

The output is a single IMAGE, same batch size as the input, ready for a save node or Batch Image Grid.

Install

Via ComfyUI Manager, search "StatusBarOverlay" (pack title ComfyUI-StatusBarOverlay), or the manual route:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/muskccat/ComfyUI-StatusBarOverlay

then restart ComfyUI. That's it - the only requirement in the repo is Pillow, and it's already there.

Troubleshooting

The realistic failure list is short. Garbage-looking text means the arial fallback kicked in - set font_path. A hard crash on a color input means your hex string is malformed. Text that overflows the bar means font_size is too big for bar_height - bump the bar or shrink the font. Text can't escape the image entirely, but it can smear toward the edge if you push y too high.

It's not a flashy node and nobody's writing threads about it - it's a tiny utility in a tiny pack with zero community footprint. But "label the image before you save it" is one of those chores you never think about until you're cross-eyed comparing six outputs, and this does it without any fuss.