Image to SHA256

There's no mystery to unpack here: you feed this node an image, it hands you back that image's SHA256 hash as a plain string. That's the entire node. No settings to fiddle with, no dial to turn.

The use case is exactly what you'd guess from a hashing node: deduplication, content-addressed filenames, or a cheap way to prove two images are pixel-for-pixel identical. If you've got a pipeline pulling reference images from multiple sources and you want to know whether you've already processed one, hash it and compare strings instead of eyeballing thumbnails. If you want output filenames that are deterministic and collision-resistant rather than ComfyUI_00001_.png incrementing forever, wire the hash into your filename builder.

It's worth knowing what it's actually hashing, because this is where people trip up. image_to_sha256 hashes the image data - the raw pixel tensor as ComfyUI holds it in memory - not a file on disk. That means two images that look identical but arrived through different codecs or compression levels can still hash the same if the decoded pixels match exactly, and it also means you should not expect this hash to match the output of running sha256sum on the saved PNG file. Those are hashing two different things: one is the decompressed pixel data, the other is the compressed file bytes plus whatever metadata got written into the container (workflow JSON, EXIF, PNG chunks, all of it). A mismatch between the two is expected behavior, not a bug.

Inputs and outputs. One required input, image (IMAGE type), and one output, sha256 (STRING). Wire the string output into whatever needs a deterministic identifier - a text concat node building a filename, a comparison node checking against a known-good hash, a logger.

Installing it. This node ships inside comfyui-sortlist, a grab-bag pack from a single GitHub author (huyl3-cpu). Easiest path is ComfyUI Manager: open it, search for the pack title comfyui-huyl2-nodes, install, restart. If Manager's index doesn't have it - this is a low-traffic, single-author pack and Manager's registry doesn't always pick those up promptly - clone it directly:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/huyl3-cpu/comfyui-sortlist

Restart ComfyUI and it'll show up under custom/utils.

Troubleshooting. The pack's own README doesn't mention this node at all - it only documents the video-segmenting node in detail - so there's no author-provided guidance to lean on beyond the schema itself. Two things worth knowing before you assume something's broken:

First, as noted above, don't compare this node's output against a file-level hash tool. If you need to verify a file hasn't been tampered with on disk, you want a different tool entirely; this node only ever sees decoded pixels, after ComfyUI has already loaded and decoded the image.

Second, because this is a small, obscure pack maintained by one person, don't be surprised if ComfyUI Manager's search comes up empty even when the pack is live on GitHub - that's a registry indexing gap, not a sign the pack was pulled. A direct git clone sidesteps it entirely.