VAE Info Loader

Most people have a handful of VAE files sitting around and no real memory of why. VAEs are rare as downloads go - there have only ever been about 200 of them published on CivitAI, against three-quarters of a million LoRAs - so unlike your LoRA folder, your VAE folder probably isn't overflowing. But the two or three you do have (the SD 1.5 "840k" fix, maybe an SDXL fp16-fix build, maybe a Wan 2.1 VAE you grabbed because someone said it fixes Qwen-Image's over-smoothing) can be genuinely hard to tell apart from filenames alone. This node reads back whatever metadata got cached for a given VAE, so you don't have to reverse-engineer which file does what from memory.

It's one of the ModelUtils/Info nodes in silveroxides' ComfyUI-ModelUtils pack, following the same pattern as the loader nodes for checkpoints, embeddings, diffusion models, and ControlNets: it reads, it doesn't fetch. The reason a VAE metadata browser earns its keep in 2026 specifically is that VAE swapping stopped being a one-time SD 1.5 fix and became an actual quality lever - people now deliberately keep a couple of alternate VAEs around to fight the over-smoothing that Qwen-Image's decoder (shared by Qwen-Image, Anima, and Krea 2) is known for, dropping in a Wan 2.1 VAE instead. If you're one of those people, you now have more than one VAE file with a genuine reason to exist, and remembering which is which stops being trivial.

How it works. Same as its siblings: it doesn't talk to the network. It surfaces whatever got cached earlier, in this case presumably via this pack's own VAE downloader (VAEInfoMetaDownloader).

Inputs that matter. vae is a dropdown of your local VAE files. workflow_index (default 0, 0–100) selects which cached example to pull, for files with more than one.

Outputs. preview (IMAGE), workflow_json (STRING), and metadata_json (STRING) - the example render, the workflow that produced it, and whatever description/source info was captured for that VAE.

Installing it. ComfyUI Manager, search "Model Utility Toolkit," install, restart - or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/silveroxides/ComfyUI-ModelUtils

then restart. Nothing extra to download for this node beyond the pack itself; it reads whatever's already in your VAE folder.

Troubleshooting. If a VAE comes back with nothing, the metadata was never fetched for it - this node won't reach out and get it for you, it just shows what's cached. That's actually the more common case for VAEs than for checkpoints or LoRAs, precisely because there are so few of them published with rich model pages to begin with; a lot of VAE files in circulation are bare tensors someone extracted from a training repo, with no CivitAI-style listing to pull metadata from at all. Don't read an empty result as the node being broken - for a lot of VAEs, there's genuinely nothing on the other end to fetch.