Thomas Dalton wrote:
I'm not sure why we give people so long - they can upload the image again if they find a use for it. I would suggest reducing it to 24 hours (enough to account for images being removed from articles without consensus, any longer is unnecessary), but I'm not really involved in the image side of things, so I'll leave it to someone else.
Images might be orphans due to vanadalism on some other article, and there's no way to check that directly from the image page itself. If orphaned fair use images were more rapidly deleted then vandalism on the low-traffic pages that use them becomes a lot more destructive.
And it's not necessarily that easy to reupload an image. The original uploader might be long gone from Wikipedia, or he might not have retained a local copy of it, etc.