🚩 VAE Selector

There are two ways to pick a VAE in ComfyUI: hardcode it in a VAE Loader widget, or make it a choice your workflow can make at runtime. VAE Selector (🚩 VAE Selector, from ControlFlowUtils) is the second way - a dropdown populated with every VAE in your models/vae folder, plus taesd and taesdxl, that hands the chosen name to the rest of your graph.

It's a small node, and it's honest about being one: the description admits the "forward directly into a loader" integration is currently unimplemented. What you get instead is the name itself, on a wire. In practice that's still useful - because the name is a string, and ComfyUI lets you convert any string widget to an input, so you can feed a selected VAE name into any loader's VAE-name field without rebuilding your workflow every time you want a different VAE.

The inputs and output

• vae - the dropdown. It's built from folder_paths.get_filename_list("vae"), so it shows every file in your VAE folder plus the two built-in TAESD options. Drop a new VAE into models/vae and it appears after a refresh.
• run_after (optional) - a dummy input whose only job is ordering: connect any node here to make the selector run after it. The description is upfront that it's "unused" except for that.

The single output, VAE Name, is the selected name as a string. Wire it to the name input of a VAE Loader (after converting that widget to an input) and your workflow now switches VAEs by changing one dropdown.

Honest limitations

Don't expect more than the name. There's no auto-wiring into a loader yet, and the "dump all VAEs as a list" mode mentioned in the description doesn't exist in the current build - the source has that option commented out. If your workflow is fine with static VAE choices, stock ComfyUI needs no help. This node earns its keep in exactly two situations:

1. Branching. Combined with an IfConditionSelector or Universal Switch, different conditions can select different VAEs before a single downstream loader.
2. Experimenting. One dropdown that lists everything you own beats typing filenames, and it plays nicely with this pack's philosophy of keeping choices dynamic.

There's also the broader pack context: ControlFlowUtils is the flow-control pack, so the "Selector" family (this, Model Selector, LoRA Selector) exists to feed model choices into dynamic graphs. For a VAE, where you rarely need to swap mid-workflow, it's more "nice to have" than "can't live without." The LoRA Selector gets far more use in the wild.

Install

VAE Selector ships in VykosX/ControlFlowUtils:

# ComfyUI Manager → Install Custom Nodes → search "ControlFlowUtils"
# or manually:
cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/VykosX/ControlFlowUtils

Restart, find it under 🐺 VykosX-ControlFlowUtils, and remember: no model files to download - it only reads what's already in your VAE folder. If a VAE you know you have doesn't show up, check the filename is in ComfyUI/models/vae and refresh ComfyUI.