🐯 YFG imgBB to Image

ComfyUI's built-in Load Image is picky: it only wants files sitting in your input folder. Which is fine until you're following a tutorial that drops a reference image in Discord, or you've got a URL you want to feed into a ControlNet preprocessor without downloading it first. That's the gap this node fills - it pulls images from arbitrary URLs and makes them tensors. The "imgBB" in the name is a bit of a lie; it'll load from any http(s):// URL, and a few other things besides.

"imgBB to Image" lives in the loaders/ folder of the gonzalu/ComfyUI_YFG_Comical pack, the sibling of the pack's Image to imgBB upload node. The pair forms a cloud round-trip, but this one needs no API key at all - it's a plain downloader.

What it accepts

The url input is a multiline text box, and you can put multiple URLs in it, one per line. Each line is parsed by scheme:

• https://... / http://... - downloaded over HTTP (with a short timeout).
• data:image/... - base64-encoded image data, decoded directly.
• file:///path/to/image.png - a local file by absolute path.
• /view?... - ComfyUI's own view URLs, resolved against your input/output/temp folders.
• a bare filename - resolved through ComfyUI's usual annotated filepath lookup.

So yes: the practical answer to "can I just paste the imgBB URL from the upload node?" is yes, that works too.

Inputs and outputs

• keep_alpha_channel - when on, the loaded image keeps its alpha channel and the node derives a MASK from that alpha (transparency becomes the mask). Off by default, which strips alpha and produces no mask - the sensible choice for plain RGB work.
• output_mode - decides how multiple images come back. On, each URL becomes its own entry in the images list (required when the sources are different sizes). Off, it tries to batch them into a single tensor - which throws an error if the images have mismatched dimensions, with a message telling you to switch to list mode. So for multi-URL loads with mixed sizes, turn it on.

Outputs: images (an IMAGE list), masks (matching MASK list), and has_image (a BOOLEAN telling you whether anything loaded - handy as a routing signal).

Installing

Standard pack install - ComfyUI Manager, search "YFG Comical", or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/gonzalu/ComfyUI_YFG_Comical

Restart ComfyUI. Needs requests (universally present). No key, no models.

The honest take

The killer feature is the URL-plus-base64 support, which the built-in loader doesn't offer. The main gotcha is the 5-second download timeout - big images on slow hosts will just fail, and the error will point at the URL. Also remember the list output: most ComfyUI nodes expect a single IMAGE, so you'll often run the images output through an index/select node before wiring it onward. Keep this next to the upload node and you've got a working upload-download image pipeline with zero cloud dependencies beyond imgBB itself.