I think that doesn't work for most smaller projects. That'll work for something like Firefox, but there's little reason for random, unheard of tools to have an image on the web. Plus the naming of some projects is super generic, which can make it hard to find correct images.

Some software changes appearance often, too, and google is bad at knowing what up to date is. It can be really easy to find wildly out of date images as the top results.

Unironically yes. Asking someone that doesn't use your project, isn't part of the development, and quite possibly doesn't even want anything to do with your project to do work for you project is silly.

I mean, it's just a suggestion. The utility depends on the goal of the project. Am I being lazy? Don't care. Do I want maximum user engagement/feedback; well, the suggestion is sound.

For a lot of open source at the moment the root level readme is fundamentally the homepage too. It absolutely should include screenshots, maybe even a gif. If your software has a GUI or TUI it should follow that a concise visual will do more to explain it's usage than a text document

Lots of projects are on GitHub or similar repositories and the landing page is usually the readme file as rendered markdown.

Where: In the repository, most projects seem to use media or screenshots as the name of the directory.

How often: Whenever a big change happened or many small changes have accumulated.

What: Light theme suffices. I only care about the general look and feel, not about specific colors.

That’s how I would do it for my own projects.

That’s one option, or use imgur.

Update them if your UI has significantly changed or does not adequately represent the final product.

If having a light/dark theme is an important feature or highly requested feature for your project, it would be nice to show it off.

Screenshots can, most of the time, get away with showing just the default configuration. Share what a user would see when opening your project for the first time, and assume they used the default configuration. Optionally, if you offer a lot of customization, show what it could look like if someone spent a good amount of time personalizing things!

Yes. Git can store binary files fine. It's not the most efficient for storing them, but it works, especially for a small number of screenshots. For updating and theme, that's entirely up to you. It's all a judgement call. If you want to show off your functionality (like a dark mode), I encourage you to include screenshots of it. If you substantially change your UI, update the images.

You don't have to update for every new button you add. It's more about giving a general impression of the UI. Is it minimalist? Is it a chaotic mess? Does it look like it fits in naturally with whatever OS appears to have been used? Does it look like any thought was put into UI and UX? Those are the kinds of things you're trying to answer.

a.) I'm not convinced you know what the word hypocrite means.

b.) More importantly, they didn't ask for "numerous," they asked for one.

c.) Searching for the UI on, say Google, can have, at best, mixed results. Ive done this, then DLed and tried out the program only to find a completely different UI.

d.) The dev adding one screenshot to their readme.md and a /media folder takes them only slightly longer than it takes potential users to look one up and maybe get a good result. Multiply that time by the number of potential users, and it's obviously more efficient, and effective, for the dev to do it.

Stop being defensive. No one's attacking you or any other dev. They're making a request. Don't like it? Don't do it. Stop calling people names and trying to stir up drama.

Edit: formatting