How Do Presets Work?

[Penguin-Guru]

My experience has been that activating a preset seems to only reliably lock those settings, without reliably changing them. Sometimes some settings are changed and some are not. The behaviour also seems a bit inconsistent for settings provided by extensions, sometimes requiring a restart and/or browser refresh. Sometimes some settings are changed but settings required to enable them are not (because they are not available for selection when creating/editing the preset).

I will try to test what I can to sort through the logic but I thought I should also ask how presets are supposed to work. I couldn't find much documentation on this. Only what's here.

[mcmonkey4eva]

The Apply button is the best way to use presets for complex settings generally. Having selected but not applied is more useful for things like prompt presets or other similar things, or if you carefully construct a preset to add a behavior (eg an I2V preset that you can enable to turn your gen into I2V, but you'll have to make sure params are very correct for that)

The only source of oddity with non-applied presets is that many settings are interdependent on others. When you explicitly apply, the UI will automatically enable other settings, but when not direct applied it might not.
For example, you can have a preset set a Controlnet Strength value... but that's not gonna do anything if you don't have a controlnet model+image, yknow? With just a selected preset, it'll be silent about it, but when you Apply it'll enable the entire controlnet group and complain if you trigger a gen without a model/image configured properly there.

[Penguin-Guru]

Got it, thank you. I didn't even notice the apply button... So presets are locked to prevent them interfering with each other during selection and then users click apply to commit the settings, which unlocks them. This makes sense and seems to work as expected so far.