StyleRef Load

Every StyleRef workflow starts here. You paste a share slug (or a full styleref.io URL) into StyleRef Load, queue it, and the whole style - colors, lighting, mood, composition, guardrails, the lot - comes out the style output as a single object you can fan out to three nodes at once. One Load feeding three Apply nodes with three unrelated subjects is the demo the pack is built around, and it's not hype: the style holds, only the subject changes.

There's no account needed for this. Every style on the public gallery at styleref.io/gallery loads by slug, free, no sign-in, no credits spent. Want to try it right now? Paste azch4ptx-2ca7d3a07f37 (the "Raw Theatrical Cinematic" style) into style_ref, add a StyleRef Apply, and you're generating.

How it works

Under the hood it's a thin client over the styleref.io REST API - same one the web app uses. The first load of a style is a network call; after that the payload is cached for the session, so re-queues are free. The use_cache toggle (default on) is the manual version of that: turn it off and the node re-validates the style on every run, re-downloading only if it actually changed on styleref.io. Leave it on. The ↻ Refresh button is the "I don't trust the cache, fetch now" path for when a style you're editing isn't updating.

Inputs and outputs

The one required input is style_ref - a slug from a styleref.io/share URL, or the full URL. Once you're signed in with the StyleRef Login node, your own private styles resolve by id or /styles/<id> URL too.

The optional ones are all conveniences:

• search - search the gallery without leaving ComfyUI. Type a query, queue, and matches appear in the node body and on the search_results output.
• category - narrow that search to one gallery category (Photography, Cinematography, Illustration, and two dozen more). Ignored when search is empty.
• save_to_library - also save this gallery style to your own StyleRef library (My Styles → Saved) as it loads. Needs sign-in; no effect on styles that are already yours.

Outputs: style, the STYLEREF_STYLE object that wires into StyleRef Apply, StyleRef Facets, or StyleRef Reference Images - and search_results, plain-text matches from a search run.

One beginner trap worth naming: style is a structured object, not text. You can't read it as a string, you can't retype it, and you can't feed it to a CLIP encoder. It's an opaque blob that only the other StyleRef nodes understand. If you find yourself wanting to see the actual words, that's what StyleRef Facets is for.

The gotcha

These nodes are a client, not a local library. The first load of any style is a network call to the API, so you need internet and the service to be up; offline, or during an outage, this node errors rather than degrading. It's worth knowing going in that "define once, reuse everywhere" is a hosted product, not a local feature. The search dialog in the UI is also a progressive enhancement - if a ComfyUI frontend update breaks it, the vanilla search field still works and results still land on search_results.

Install

ComfyUI Manager - search StyleRef - or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/StyleRef/styleref-comfyui

Restart and look for [StyleRef] v1.0.6 - 5 nodes registered in the server console. No Python dependencies to install - the pack runs on the standard library alone, which is rarer in the custom-node world than it should be. STYLEREF_API repoints the client if you self-host the API. Nothing here spends credits.