comfyui-gallery-loader

Touch-friendly gallery picker for ComfyUI image, video and path widgets.

Four complementary entry points share one card-grid picker:

1. Load Image (Gallery) node — drop-in LoadImage replacement with the picker rendered inline on the node body. Cards scroll independently of the LiteGraph canvas, so it works on mobile and tablet.
2. Modal picker over stock LoadImage — clicking the image widget on any LoadImage / LoadImageMask / LoadImageOutput opens a card-grid modal with Input / Output / Temp tabs.
3. Modal picker over the video and folder loaders — core LoadVideo, plus VHS's VHS_LoadVideo, VHS_LoadVideoFFmpeg and VHS_LoadImages. Same three tabs, video posters on the cards, and a folder picker for the directory loader.
4. Filesystem browser for VHS path-loader nodes — 📁 Browse button on VHS_LoadImagePath, VHS_LoadImagesPath, VHS_LoadVideoPath, and VHS_LoadVideoFFmpegPath opens the modal rooted at the ComfyUI install directory. Video files preview as <video> thumbnails; directory loaders get a footer "Use this folder" commit button.

Why

ComfyUI's native image dropdown is alphabetical, single-column, and unsearchable. The card grid is the same UX as the output panel: mtime-sorted by default, fuzzy-searchable, with image thumbnails or video posters. On mobile/tablet the grid is the only viable picker — the native LiteGraph dropdown is unusable on touch.

Install

ComfyUI Manager → "Install Custom Nodes" → search for Gallery Loader. Or clone manually:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/laurigates/comfyui-gallery-loader
# restart ComfyUI; no Python deps beyond what ComfyUI core ships

Load Image (Gallery) node

Output	Type	Notes
image	IMAGE	Same loading semantics as the core LoadImage.
mask	MASK	Alpha channel inverted, matching core.
path	STRING	Resolved on-disk path — handy for SaveImage filename reuse / metadata.

The widget stores either an annotated path (subdir/foo.png [output]) or a bare absolute path. Both forms resolve via folder_paths.get_annotated_filepath.

Modal over stock LoadImage

Click the image combo widget — instead of the native dropdown, the modal opens with three source tabs:

Tab	Reads from	Commits value as
Input	ComfyUI/input/	subdir/foo.png
Output	ComfyUI/output/	subdir/foo.png [output]
Temp	ComfyUI/temp/	subdir/foo.png [temp]

The annotated values are resolved transparently by core LoadImage via folder_paths.get_annotated_filepath. Existing workflows that target input/ keep using the bare-relative form — no value churn.

A 📁 Browse gallery button is also added below the widget so the picker is reachable even on frontends that hijack the combo's click through the Vue Asset Browser overlay.

Video and folder loaders

The same modal, the same three tabs, over the upload-flavour video and directory combos:

Node	Widget	Mode	Lists
LoadVideo (core)	file	File	.mp4 .webm .mov .mkv .avi .m4v .mpg .mpeg
VHS_LoadVideo	video	File	.webm .mp4 .mkv .gif .mov
VHS_LoadVideoFFmpeg	video	File	.webm .mp4 .mkv .gif .mov
VHS_LoadImages	directory	Directory	(folder picker)

Every one of these resolves its value through folder_paths.get_annotated_filepath, so the [output] / [temp] forms load exactly like the bare input names their native dropdowns offer — which is what lets you pick a render straight out of output/ without copying it into input/ first.

The VHS video sets mirror VHS's own video_extensions list, so the grid shows precisely what each node's native dropdown would. .gif is in that list and renders as a still thumbnail rather than a <video>.

VHS_LoadImages opens inside its currently selected folder: file cards are inert, clicking a folder descends, and the footer "Use this folder" button commits. At a root the committed value is . (which resolves to the root itself) rather than an empty string.

Video cards use a <video preload="metadata"> poster, loaded lazily as the card scrolls into view — the same treatment the VHS path loaders already got. There is no ⓘ metadata button on a video card; the metadata endpoint reads image formats only.

Pins

Two kinds of pin, one list:

• 📌 in the toolbar pins the folder you're in. Pinned folders render as chips on their own toolbar row — tap to jump there, ✕ to unpin.
• 📌 on an image card pins that single file. The 📌 pinned tab then shows every pinned file, from every root, in one grid — each labelled with its full address (output/2026-08-04/). Tapping the label navigates there; tapping the card commits the value immediately, so a favourite image is one tap from any LoadImage node with no navigation at all.

The list lives on the server, in <user_dir>/comfy-pins.json — not in the browser. That is what makes it work across devices (your phone and your desktop are two browsers against one ComfyUI, which localStorage structurally cannot span) and across packs: comfyui-image-browser reads and writes the same file, so a pin made in either shows up in the other. An older browser-side pin list is migrated into it once, automatically.

Because the store is a file on the ComfyUI host, pins are per-install, not per-user — a second person using that same ComfyUI shares the list.

A pin whose file has been deleted or moved is not silently dropped ("the file moved" and "you never pinned it" are different facts): it renders dimmed, refuses to commit, and can be cleared individually with 📌 or in bulk with Prune missing.

The pinned tab is offered on file pickers only — a directory picker commits a folder, so a pinned-media view has nothing to offer there — and pins address the three sandboxed roots only, never a VHS absolute path.

Safe View

Matches a keyword list against file and folder names and the file's own XMP keywords, and blurs the thumbnails that hit, blocks out their names, and — optionally — drops them from the listing entirely. It exists for the ordinary case of browsing your own renders on a phone with someone else in the room.

This is discretion, not access control. A CSS blur is one devtools override away from gone, and the blurred bytes are still downloaded and still sit in the browser cache. It defeats a shoulder, not an adversary. Nothing here is a permission boundary: every endpoint still serves any file you address directly, exactly as it did before.

The toolbar 👁 / 🙈 toggles it; the eye is also a row in the Touch Tools chooser. Settings live under Settings → Touch Tools → Safe View:

Setting	Default	What it does
Safe View	on	Master switch. With no keywords it filters nothing, so "on" is inert until you add one.
Keywords	nsfw	Comma- or space-separated.
Remove matches from the listing entirely	off	Drops matches server-side so they never reach the browser.
Block out names too	on	Replaces the name, its folder label and its tooltip with a solid block.
Also match the generation prompt and model	off	Not implemented yet — see below.

Keywords match whole words, never substrings. nsfw matches output/nsfw/pic.png and my_nsfw_pic.png; it does not match nsfwish.png, and ass does not match assets/. Matching is case-insensitive and runs against the file name plus every folder above it, including the root — so temp blurs everything under the temp tab. A blurred card carries a 👁 that reveals just that card, until you change folder or close the picker.

Marking a file sensitive (🙈)

Names and folders are whatever you happened to call them. The third thing a keyword is matched against is the file's own dc:subject keywords — the standard "Keywords" field every photo manager reads and writes — so a marked file stays marked through a rename, a move, or a copy to another machine.

Every file card carries a 🙈. Tapping it writes your first configured keyword into the file's XMP and the card blurs immediately; tapping it again removes that keyword. The button says which word it will write, because that word is what the file ends up carrying. (With an empty keyword list there is nothing it could write that your own filter would match, so the button is not shown at all.)

The write is the same read-modify-write the star rating uses: your other keywords, your caption, the creator field and every other property already on the file are preserved, and a file whose XMP cannot be parsed safely is never overwritten — the keyword goes to a .xmp sidecar instead. Formats without in-file XMP support (WebP, MP4, WebM) always use the sidecar.

It is interoperable in both directions. A file you tag nsfw in digiKam, Lightroom, Bridge, XnView, ExifTool or Windows Explorer is matched here with no extra step; a file you mark here shows up tagged in all of them (the keyword is mirrored to MicrosoftPhoto:LastKeywordXMP too, which is what Windows reads).

Marking is still discretion, not access control — it changes what the grid blurs and what /list returns, and nothing else. Anyone who addresses the file directly gets the same bytes as before.

The keywords and every toggle are shared with comfyui-image-browser — both packs register the same settings, so one keyword list covers both, and because ComfyUI stores settings server-side it follows you across devices. If both packs are installed you will see one benign console.warn about a duplicate setting id at load; that is the sharing mechanism working, not a fault.

What it does not cover

Worth reading before relying on it — these are known gaps, not bugs:

• Folders are matched by name only. A blandly-named folder full of sensitive files is not caught in folder view, because a folder card carries nothing else to match on — a folder has no XMP. Flat view (≣) lists the files themselves and does catch them, keywords included.
• A keyword written by 🙈 is a keyword, not a flag. Anything that reads the file's metadata can see it, and anything that strips metadata (some upload pipelines, some editors' "export") removes it. That is the price of it being interoperable at all.
• Confirmations and toasts name files in plain text. A rating failure or a pin error names the file it was about, unblurred.
• The metadata panel (ⓘ) shows the full prompt, whether or not the card is blurred. Prompt/model matching is a later phase; the setting for it is listed above but does nothing yet.
• A node's own canvas preview is untouched. A fresh render appears full-size on the graph, unfiltered — that is ComfyUI's own output preview and nothing in this pack can reach it.
• Nothing is encrypted, moved, or access-controlled. The files stay exactly where they are, readable by anything else on the machine.

VHS path-loader integration

VHS path widgets are detected via widget.options.vhs_path_extensions. A 📁 Browse files / 📁 Browse folder button opens the modal in path-mode, rooted at folder_paths.base_path (or inside the widget's current value if set). Selected files commit as a raw absolute path — the format VHS already accepts.

Node	Mode	Extensions
VHS_LoadImagePath	File	Image formats
VHS_LoadImagesPath	Directory	(folder picker)
VHS_LoadVideoPath	File	Video formats
VHS_LoadVideoFFmpegPath	File	Video formats

Directory mode: file cards render but are inert; clicking a folder descends, clicking the footer "Use this folder" button commits the current absolute path.

Endpoints

Route	Purpose
GET /gallery_loader/list	Directory listing. Params: type=input|output|temp|path, subfolder, path, extensions (CSV), plus safe_kw (CSV keywords) + safe_hide=1 for Safe View's server-side hide. Both Safe View params are required together; either alone filters nothing. Name/path hiding is applied above the newest-N cap, and the dc:subject keyword tier (which needs the XMP read) tops the page back up as it probes, so a mostly-sensitive folder still returns a full page of the rest. Every row carries tags — the file's dc:subject keywords, read in the same pass as the rating. Image dims (width/height) are populated for image entries only.
GET /gallery_loader/base	Returns base_path, input_dir, output_dir, temp_dir, user_dir. Used by the modal to default VHS path-mode to the ComfyUI install root.
GET /gallery_loader/thumb	Webp 512px thumbnail for images at an arbitrary absolute path. Managed-type listings use core /api/view directly.
GET /gallery_loader/file	Streams a whitelisted-extension file (images + common video formats) at an absolute path. Used for video posters in path-mode where core /api/view doesn't apply.
POST /gallery_loader/tag	Add or remove ONE dc:subject keyword: {type, subfolder|path, name, tag, present}. A delta — the file's other keywords, its rating and every foreign XMP property survive. Answers {ok, tags, backend} where tags is read back off the file after the write, not echoed from the request.
GET /gallery_loader/pins	The pin list, every entry resolved: {ok, max, pins}, each pin carrying exists plus (for a live file pin) the same per-file keys /list emits. An unresolvable pin is returned with exists: false, never dropped.
POST /gallery_loader/pins	One delta — {op: "add"|"remove"|"prune", item?} — never a whole-list PUT (two open browsers would each send their own list and the second write would discard the first's pin). Answers with the same whole list as the GET. add on an existing pin is a successful no-op.

Compatibility

• ComfyUI frontend >= 1.40 (widget onPointerDown hook).
• Works alongside the legacy node combo and the modern Vue Asset Browser — the modal strips image_upload / video_upload from node specs before the widget is constructed, falling back to a plain canvas combo whose click we can intercept. audio_upload and mesh_upload combos are left alone; the picker can't serve them, so they keep their native control.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.