ComfyUI Workflow Extractor

What ComfyUI stores in a PNG

When ComfyUI saves an image with the default Save Image node it writes two PNG text chunks: workflow — the editable canvas graph (nodes, positions, links, groups, widget values) — and prompt — the flattened API graph that was actually executed (node id → class_type + inputs). Both are plain JSON, so the entire recipe travels with the image. Some custom save nodes also add parameters in A1111 style for Civitai compatibility.

How to extract and reload the workflow

1. Upload the original PNG above (not a screenshot — see why PNGs lose metadata).
2. The Generation summary shows seed, steps, CFG, sampler, scheduler, checkpoint, LoRAs and latent size, plus every text prompt found in CLIPTextEncode nodes.
3. Click download workflow .json, then drag that file onto the ComfyUI canvas — or drag the PNG itself into ComfyUI. Missing custom nodes will show as red placeholders; install them via ComfyUI-Manager.

prompt vs. workflow: which one do you need?

Use workflow to rebuild the graph in the UI. Use prompt if you are calling ComfyUI's HTTP API (POST /prompt) from a script — it is exactly the payload the server expects. PNGMeta pretty-prints both and lets you copy or download each separately.

Common problems

• Only "prompt" is present, no "workflow" — the image was produced via the API or with a save node that skips the canvas graph. You can still see all prompts and settings.
• No metadata at all — the file was re-encoded (Discord mobile, WhatsApp, Reddit, screenshots). Ask for the original file.
• Prompt text is empty — some workflows feed prompts through custom text nodes (e.g. Primitive, String Literal); open the raw workflow chunk and search for the node title.