TS Smart Switch

Every workflow eventually needs the plumbing question answered: "use this input, or that one?" A plain boolean switch handles it - until one of the branches isn't connected, at which point most switches hand you a None, a blank, or a hard error. TS Smart Switch is the version with a safety net: it's a type-aware boolean switch for any data, and if the input it's told to select is missing, it auto-fails over to the other one. Optional branches become a one-node thing instead of a rewire.

How it works

Two inputs in, one out. switch is a boolean (labelled "Input 1" / "Input 2" in the UI) that picks the branch. The twist is data_type - a dropdown (images, video, audio, mask, string, int, float, …) that the node validates each input against. Connect a mismatched type into a slot and it's ignored rather than let through, so you can't silently route a string into an image socket and discover it three nodes later.

The auto-failover is the feature worth building around: switch on selects Input 1, off selects Input 2 - but if the selected input is empty, the other one passes through regardless. That's the whole "make one input optional with a sensible fallback" pattern from the README, and it's exactly how you build a branch that degrades gracefully: wire the primary source, leave the fallback optional, and the graph keeps running whether or not the primary is connected.

Both inputs are * (ANY type) and both are optional; the output mirrors whatever you fed in. Because the socket types are wildcards, the same node routes images, audio, masks, strings - anything the graph carries.

The setting that matters

• data_type - set it once to the kind of data you're routing (e.g. images for an image branch, audio for an audio branch). It's what makes the mismatch-ignoring and the type safety work.
• switch - the boolean. Convert it to an input and drive it from a node (a seeded random, a frontend toggle) for dynamic routing.

Install

No dependencies - pure-Python utility inside comfyui-timesaver.

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/AlexYez/comfyui-timesaver
cd comfyui-timesaver
python -m pip install -r requirements.txt

Restart and search "TS Smart Switch".

Common issues

• "It passed through the wrong input." Check switch's position and whether the selected input was actually empty - if it was, failover did its job.
• "My input got ignored." data_type mismatch. The node validates against the declared type and drops mismatches on purpose; pick the right type and it'll connect.
• "The sockets show as ANY and won't connect." ComfyUI highlights compatible sockets while dragging - the wildcard accepts whatever you bring. If a specific connection won't take, it's the data_type validation doing its thing.

The honest scope: this is one of those nodes you forget exists until a graph keeps failing on an empty branch, and then it saves the afternoon. It won't do anything a careful hand-built switch can't - it just makes the "optional with fallback" case stop being fiddly.