File not found in Checkpoints

[lynaakli-dev]

Hello, I'm stuck at this step. Can you help me?

[Avik-Das-567]

This usually means no checkpoint is loaded yet.

In your screenshot, the Load Checkpoint node shows ckpt_name: null, which means ComfyUI isn't finding any checkpoint models yet. Until a checkpoint is selected, nothing downstream will run.

To fix it:

1. Download a checkpoint

Grab a .safetensors or .ckpt base model (SD 1.5 or SDXL) from somewhere like Hugging Face or CivitAI. Make sure it’s a full model, not a LoRA, refiner, or embedding.

2. Put it in the right folder

ComfyUI/models/checkpoints/

(Create the folder if it doesn’t exist.)

3. Reload models

Restart ComfyUI or use the refresh button so it rescans the models folder.

4. Select the checkpoint

Open the dropdown in the Load Checkpoint node and pick the model you added. Once selected, the MODEL / CLIP / VAE outputs will activate.
After that, your graph wiring looks fine:

• MODEL → KSampler
• CLIP → both CLIP Text Encode nodes
• VAE → VAE Decode

If the dropdown is still empty, double-check that the file is directly in the checkpoints folder, has a valid .ckpt or .safetensors extension, and isn’t inside another subfolder.

[lynaakli-dev]

Hello, thank you for your quick reply. That's exactly what I'm doing, unfortunately the file is not found.

[AzelusLightvale]

ComfyUI does not refresh model directories by default after loading. After downloading a model into the correct directory, press r on the keyboard (or click on the ComfyUI icon -> Edit -> Refresh Node Definitions), then check your Load Checkpoint node again.

[Avik-Das-567]

@lynaakli-dev Thanks for the screenshots, that helps.

The file placement looks correct, so this isn't a path or filename issue. What's happening is that ComfyUI doesn't automatically rescan the models folder (directory) after it's already running.

After adding a checkpoint, you need to force a refresh:

• Press R in the ComfyUI window, or
• Click the ComfyUI logo → Edit → Refresh Node Definitions, or
• Fully restart ComfyUI

Once you do that, the checkpoint should appear in the Load Checkpoint dropdown instead of undefined.

If it still doesn't show up after a restart, double-check that the file is directly inside models/checkpoints/ (not nested) and that Finder isn't hiding a second extension.

[lynaakli-dev]

Thank you for your replies, it still doesn't work 😮‍💨

[Avik-Das-567]

@lynaakli-dev If a full restart didn't fix it, one thing I'd check is whether ComfyUI is actually running from the same folder where you put the model.

On macOS it's pretty common to end up with two ComfyUI folders (for example one cloned from GitHub and one downloaded as a zip), and the model gets copied into the wrong one.

In the terminal window where you started ComfyUI, you should see the folder it's running from. From that exact folder, make sure the model is inside: models/checkpoints/

If you're not sure, you can paste the full path shown in the terminal and we can double-check it.

[samtang1188]

Why is there a red ring around the node? Something not right with node? Normally I get a red ring like this is because the node is missing.

[AzelusLightvale]

Look at the image. ckpt_name is undefined, which usually happens when the node cannot detect any checkpoints to load (basically there is nothing in models/checkpoints or output/checkpoints). That's why there's a red ring, as red rings usually indicate missing or broken widget information. Red rings around missing nodes are similar, as they are basically the same thing but reversed: the widget information are all there (and are technically correct), but the node that does that processing isn't, so ComfyUI puts a placeholder with all of the relevant widgets until you fill that node back in.