The '%' operator is called string formatting operator when used with a string on the left side. '%d' is the formatting code to print out an integer number (you will get a type error if the value isn't numeric). With '%2d you can specify the length, and '%02d' can be used to set the padding character to a 0 instead of the default space.
This is a dumb solution but I was getting type errors with the other solutions above. So if all else fails, yolo:
images3digit = []
for i in images:
if len(i)==1:
i = '00'+i
images3digit.append(i)
elif len(i)==2:
i = '0'+i
images3digit.append(i)
elif len(i)==3:
images3digit.append(i)