A FORMER Elmore man who went through strangers' letters in order to find them on Facebook and choose "pretty victims" to stalk has been sentenced to eight years in prison.

Australian Federal Police initially charged Steven Burke with child pornography crimes after seizing electronic devices from his home in December 2015. 

The devices contained hundreds of thousands of child exploitation files, the County Court was told on Thursday.

Burke, 39, who had been previously convicted in Bendigo of child pornography offences, downloaded the files from programs which he used to access the "dark net" and encrypt them so that they would be undetectable.

After he was released on bail, police investigating also found photos and videos he had taken of teenage girls and women who were naked and in different stages of undress in their bedrooms on the devices.

They arrested him again in May 2016, finding him with a phone which had access to the internet and a USB stick which contained child exploitation material and which violated his bail conditions. 

Burke admitted to police he "perved" on people in their homes and took videos of them on his phone for his own sexual gratification.

He went through strangers' mail and looked their names up on social media website Facebook, the court heard, and targeted "pretty victims". He took more than 100 photos of some victims.

The man admitted he visited one woman about 50 times over six months. He also planned to stalk one of the customers he met at work at her home, but then went on to take 544 photos of her two teenage daughters instead. 

Judge Christopher Ryan said that a sample of more than 400,000 child exploitation files in Burke's home involved children performing sexual acts on each other and on adults, bestiality, and disturbing animated images of children.

The depravity of the images' creator "beggars belief" he said.

Burke also admitted to loitering outside a school in St Kilda East and taking 15 photos of a girl, which were found to be child pornography.

The school's security guards nearly caught him on school grounds a number of times, after they found him looking inside the windows and chased him away.

Burke told a psychologist he struggled to empathise with his victims because they appeared to him as images on a screen.

He was abused by an Anglican minister, a family friend of his parents, when he was between 12 and 14 years' old, the court heard.

Judge Christopher Ryan said that accessing and making child pornography were not "victimless crimes".

"It must never be forgotten that every child who appears in child pornography is a victim," the judge said.

Burke pleaded guilty in April to a number of charges including stalking, making, accessing and possessing child pornography, loitering in a school, and using a surveillance device to observe private acts without the person's consent.

The judge sentenced him to eight years' prison with a non-parole period of six years.

He said Burke would be on the sex offenders' register for life.