Load Image (from Folder)

ComfyUI's stock loaders are chained to input/. This one isn't.

Every ComfyUI install has a ComfyUI/input/ folder, and every built-in image loader wants to eat from it. That's a deliberate security choice - the README even concedes it's "understandable by security" - and it's also deeply annoying the moment your real work lives somewhere else: a project directory, a second drive, a folder of reference photos you never bothered to copy over. Load Image (from Any Folder) from ComfyUI-acgc99-pack just takes an absolute path and reads it.

How it behaves

The one input is folder - a plain string holding the full path. Paste it in, or hit the Select Folder button the pack's frontend adds to the node (it opens the same native dialog the sibling Select Folder node uses) and pick the directory. Then the node:

• lists every .png, .jpg, .jpeg, and .webp file immediately inside that folder - no recursion into subfolders;
• loads each one into a normal ComfyUI image tensor;
• hands you the whole pile as images, an IMAGE list, plus foldername, the resolved absolute path.

The list comes back in the host filesystem's raw order, which in practice is "however the OS felt that day." If ordering matters downstream, keep it in mind before you feed a batch onward.

The catch: everything lands in RAM at once

This is a "load the whole folder" node, not a "process the whole folder" node. Every image is converted to a float tensor and held in memory in a single list before anything downstream touches it. A hundred 1K photos is fine. A thousand 4K scans will make you watch the task manager in a way you didn't want to.

For that, the same pack has the better tool: Load Image Serially (from Folder), which keeps one image in memory at a time and queues a separate workflow run per file. Reach for this node when you genuinely want the batch as a list - feeding one consumer, wiring all images at once - and keep folder sizes modest.

Install

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/acgc99/ComfyUI-acgc99-pack.git

Or search ComfyUI-acgc99-pack in ComfyUI Manager. Restart ComfyUI, then do a full browser-tab reload - the folder-picker button lives in frontend JS, and a stale tab won't show it. There's no requirements.txt and no model to download; the pack's only hidden dependency is a system folder-picker tool on Linux (see Select Folder).

When it bites

• "Folder does not exist." The path is checked with os.path.isdir before anything runs. Typos, unmounted drives, and ~ that didn't expand the way you expected all land here. It does expand ~, so ~/Pictures/refs works from the host account.
• "No valid images found in folder." The folder exists but has no PNG/JPG/JPEG/WebP directly inside it, or everything's nested in subfolders. The node won't go looking deeper.
• Memory. If ComfyUI freezes or the box grinds on queue, that's the whole-folder-in-RAM design, not a bug in your graph.

It's a small, honest utility from a pack that calls itself "vibe coded" - nothing clever, just the one restriction the stock loader won't lift. If you've ever copy-pasted a folder of images into input/ out of spite, this is the patch.