A 77-year-old pensioner with a collection of more than 100,000 indecent pictures of children on his computers has been jailed for 12 months at Worcester Crown Court.

The sentence would bring ignominy and humiliation on Keith Rogers, said Judge Robert Juckes QC, and the offences reflected a dark side in the life of a man who had been married nearly 60 years.

Rogers, of Birch Coppice, Droitwich, pleaded guilty to six offences of making indecent images of children and to two offences of distributing them.

He was arrested by police in February this year in Operation Spade, which was a crack-down on people obtaining images from Canada. They found four lap-top computers, two hidden in a loft, and a variety of other electronic gadgets.

They later discovered that he was renting a mail box address in Worcester and they found two DVDs containing indecent pictures.

Michael Aspinall, prosecuting, said Rogers had a total of 100,303 stills and 120 moving images of children. More than 86,000 were in category C, not the most serious level, and it was 24 samples of these which had been distributed between July and September 2011.

Rogers had confessed to a predilection for young boys, mainly between the ages of seven and 10. One picture showed a young boy kneeling, gagged and bound with leather straps

Mr Aspinall said Rogers was fined £2,500 in September 2003 on two charges of possessing indecent images of children.

Charles Hamer, mitigating, said the fine had been paid and his computer seized. He had signed the sex offenders register and for some years the conviction had a salutary effect. But he now accepted he had an emotional problem, an addiction. He had taken steps to try and cure it.

The judge said it was sad to see a man of Rogers's age standing in the dock. The previous conviction should have been a warning. The aggravating factor was not only the possession of indecent material but the distribution of it.

Custody was inevitable but he had reduced the sentence from two years to 12 months because of the guilty plea. He would serve half and spend the remainder on licence.

He made a sexual offences prevention order for ten years with a similar time to be spent on the sex offenders register. The judge awarded £340 prosecution costs with a victim impact surcharge of £100.

Speaking after the case, DC Mark Churchill said: "Rogers was convicted as part of a major, nationwide investigation which saw us working with the National Crime Agency, forces across the country and other agencies.

"We targeted offenders accessing child abuse images from online sites. Children are victimised not only when they are abused and an image is first taken, they are victimised repeatedly every time that image is viewed.

"Child abusers need to know that the internet is not a safe space for them to operate. They leave a digital footprint and we will find it."