Later tonight Digg will finally unveil its images section according to Kevin Rose on Digg the Blog. To go along with the update, Digg will now support a universal taxonomy meaning that any user can submit either a news story, an image, or a video to any category. There will also be a new ‘Lifestyle’ category, and ‘Offbeat’ will be its own category.

When submitting an image, Digg will do what many other image posting web apps do and allow you to submit a link, Digg will crawl that site and find the image – and if there are more than one present you with thumbnails to select the image you want. They’re also adding a new ‘mosaic’ feature to make it easy to sort through the images as well.

One problem that has plagued Digg since the beginning has been duplicate submissions, and an ‘Images’ section seems particularly vulnerable to that since pictures are reposted so often on the Internet. Digg is clearly aware of this and has added image recognition technology from a company called Idee Inc. to try and combat the issue.

The recently much talked-about Mixx, has had an images section from the get-go (as I highlighted in my initial review a few months ago) and does a particularly nice job with it – and they clearly know this as the ‘Popular Photos’ section is at the very top of the page of the default site homepage. It will be interesting to see how Digg’s Images section stacks up – normally when they launch something a competitor doesn’t already have it in place.

The image sharing site Photobucket will have Digg incorporated right away – I’m sure others will follow soon. And finally just like the old James Bond movies, we get word of what to expect next from Digg: coming soon, a (nother) new comments system.

[UPDATE]: TechCrunch has some screenshots of the new section/submission process.

[UPDATE 2]: Digg / Images is now live (as you can see in the top screenshot) – as are the new categories.