Symbiotica Pick

Every generator run gives you variants, and you keep one. In a plain ComfyUI graph that means manually dragging the good ones out of the output folder - until the next run overwrites nothing but you've lost track of which is which. Symbiotica Pick is the triage step that fixes that: every image wired into it gets filed in the node's own buffer, drawn as a thumbnail on the node body, and only the ones you tick leave the node.

It's the middle of the pack's generate → pick → edit → pick → background-removal rhythm, and it's genuinely well built for that. Three separate runs of the same generator stack up as three candidates instead of stomping on each other.

How it works - the part people find surprising

Pick writes nothing and stores nothing. The images it shows are read off disk, where your Save Image node already put them. The images input's actual value is never used - its only job is to make this node run after the generator, so a fresh render is listed in the same queue it was made.

The one thing it does write is your approval: ticking a tile also writes _final_from.<render>_00001_.png next to the render, and un-ticking deletes it. That file is how the rest of the pipeline knows something was approved - a tick lives on the node's widget, which nothing else on the canvas can read, so an approval another node has to see has to be a file.

The inputs that matter

• save_path - the folder this node lists. Wire Asset Focus's save_path here (the same string your save nodes take) and the two can't disagree.
• mode - multiple for picking a set, single for editing, where ticking replaces the previous pick instead of adding to it.
• names - filter the listing. An entry with an extension is one exact file; one without is a save prefix (_base, edits), so it lists exactly what a Save Image with that tag wrote. Empty lists the whole folder.
• show - matters only when another picker feeds this one. approved lists what that picker ticked; edits lists the files saved from those ticks.

The outputs

• picked - the IMAGEs you ticked. This is the one you wire onward into the edit or the next stage.
• save_path - the path it lists, ready to paste into a Save Image's filename_prefix.
• edit_save_path - save_path marked with the render you picked, for the Save Image that writes edits of it.
• for_edit - the images you marked with the ✎ button, as their own lane.

Install

The pack installs as one unit - search Symbiotica in ComfyUI Manager, or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/symbiotica-ai/comfyui-nodes.git symbiotica
pip install -r symbiotica/requirements.txt

Then restart. No API key, no model download for this node - it reads folders and shows thumbnails.

Gotchas

Since images is optional on purpose, you can mute the generator branch once picks are made and queue the edit stage without re-firing a paid render. That's the move people discover late and love. Resting on a thumbnail floats it big beside the grid, so you can judge a render without opening it in a tab - don't skip that, it's half the point. One caveat: this is a niche production-pipeline pack with little community chatter, so if something misbehaves the README (which is unusually thorough) beats a search.