Kevin Charles Rose, 46, pleaded guilty yesterday to two counts of using a carriage service to access child exploitation material and one count of possessing child exploitation material.

Rose looked at child porn for about an hour a day for three years before police searched his home on December 20, 2011.

He used the guest account on his laptop to access child porn, and opened 6248 websites in the two months before his arrest.

Rose also downloaded a small selection of images and pornographic stories on to a USB stick every few days and viewed them several times before deleting them.

Sentencing him in the Supreme Court in Launceston yesterday, Justice Peter Evans said the crime was serious because of the sheer volume of images Rose had viewed in the three years.

''Largely because of the very substantial number of children who must have been exploited in the process of the creation of the many images accessed by the defendant, I consider that an immediately effective sentence of imprisonment is necessary,'' he said.

Justice Evans said he did not believe Rose's claim that he was not sexually gratified by the child exploitation material.

Rose will be placed on the sex offenders register for five years from his release from custody.