Should we really expect everybody to check on everything they care about every 24 hours?
The 7 days here or 5 for proposed article deletion seems like a reasonable balance between friendliness and tidiness, but I'd be a little frustrated to find that something I was working on was gone because I'd taken the weekend off.
We don't need everybody to check, just one person out of everyone that wants the image kept needs to check. If there is only one person that wants the image kept on an article, then there isn't consensus to keep it, is there?