Police found more than 500 pictures and videos of the abuse featuring children as young as seven or eight following a morning raid.
Officers swooped on Paul Hawthorn's home address following information that a computer linked to the property had been downloading incident material.
Swansea Crown Court heard the discovery of a stash of pictures - together with evidence of internet searches using terms such as "schoolgirl Lolita" - has led to the end of the defendant's 23-year relationship with his partner.
Gareth Waite, prosecuting, said officers executed a search warrant at 51-year-old Hawthorn's house in Hundleton near Pembroke , in December 2018.
They seized a number of laptops, a tower computer, and a hard drive.
The court heard that on one of the laptops police found a total of 529 incident images, 13 of which were Category A - the most extreme kind - nine were Category B, and 487 were Category C.
Officers found evidence of Google searches for sexual material featuring children.
Mr Waite some of the children in the images were aged as young as seven or eight.
In his subsequent police interview he said he did not known why he had sought out such images but said he some kind of "strange interest" in them.
Hawthorn, previously of Guilderoy Road, Hundleton, but now of Dores Road, Inverness, Scotland, had previously pleaded guilty to three counts of making incident images of children when he appeared in the dock for sentencing.
The court heard he has one previous conviction for an unrelated matter.
Dan Griffiths, defending Hawthorn, said the defendant now admitted that his primary motivation for seeking out the material was sexual gratification.
He said the incident had "cost him his 23-year relationship, which is dead in the water".
The advocate said Hawthorn now works for his brother's engineering company in Scotland.
Judge Geraint Walters said it was clear the defendant had a "long-standing predilection" for seeking out indecent images.
He said all right minded people would find the subject matter of the photographs "disgusting", and he told the defendant he had to realise the children in the images were real youngsters being sexually abused by "the most depraved in our communities" for the gratification of others, and mentally scarred for the rest of their lives as a result.
The judge said any sentence he could impose under the guidelines would not be long enough to allow for the defendant to receive help to tackle the issues underlying the offending while in custody, so allowing the probation service to work with him in the community was the better option.
Hawthorn was sentenced to a total of eight months prison suspended for two years, and was ordered to complete a rehabilitation course. He was also made the subject of a sexual harm prevention order to control his access to the internet for the next 10 years, and will be on the sex offenders register for the same period of time.
