VAE Loader

ComfyUI gives you two ways to get a VAE, and it makes you pick a lane. There's the Load VAE node, which reads a .safetensors from your models/vae/ folder. And there's the VAE output that hangs off Load Checkpoint, which is whatever the checkpoint baked in. Want to switch between the two to test them? You rewire the graph every time.

VAELoader-rcsaquino collapses both lanes into one dropdown. Feed it the VAE from your checkpoint loader, pick "Baked VAE", and it hands that right back to you. Pick any other name and it loads that file from models/vae/ instead. One node, one dropdown, one VAE output either way.

Mechanically it's a thin wrapper around ComfyUI's core VAELoader. The vae_name dropdown is built from "Baked VAE" plus the full list of VAE files ComfyUI can see in your models/vae/ folder, and the logic is a single if/else: "Baked VAE" passes your input straight through, anything else calls the core loader. No new dependencies, no moving parts to break.

The inputs:

• baked_vae - the VAE output from Load Checkpoint. It's marked required, and here's the thing: even if you plan to always use an external VAE, you still have to wire this up. The node won't complain if it's the wrong one for the checkpoint, but it needs the socket filled.
• vae_name - the dropdown that does all the work.

The output is a single VAE, which you wire into a VAEDecode (or a VAEEncode) wherever you'd normally use the core Load VAE node.

Honest assessment: this is the thinnest node in the pack. If you always use the baked VAE, it adds a node to your graph that does literally nothing except pass a value through. It earns its keep in two situations. First, A/B testing - you want to see whether the separate vae-ft-mse-840000-ema-pruned (the SD 1.5 standard) beats what your merge baked in, and you don't want to rebuild the graph to find out. Second, template workflows - you have a saved graph built around a dedicated VAE loader, but you sometimes load checkpoints whose baked VAE is perfectly good; this lets one template serve both without editing.

Install is the standard, shared across the pack:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/rcsaquino/comfyui-custom-nodes
# restart ComfyUI

Or ComfyUI Manager → search "comfyui-custom-nodes". Fair warning: installing the pack also pulls in rembg for its Background Remover sibling, so you get onnxruntime along with this tiny utility.

The one genuine trap: the dropdown only lists VAEs physically present in models/vae/. Missing VAE file, missing dropdown entry. That's not a bug - it's the core loader's list, shown verbatim. For a grey, washed-out image and no external VAE in the folder, this node won't save you; go download the right VAE first.