Hi
First I am sorry for your health and loss of your parent. My father passed in 2002 having suffered with Parkinsons for many years. He actually moved to Thailand for the majority of his last years and only moved back for the enhanced health care he required. He fortunately, did not live to see my fall from grace. My mother who did, passed quite recently and I know it had been hard for her.

The reason for my reply is that in another topic I mentioned a podcast by Nicky Campbell - radio 5, that was discussing Hew Edwards sentencing and was that fair. In it a lawer described the process behind the wording of "making" and sentencing guidelines.
In brief when an individual "takes the original photo/video" it is created on the "camera/video" storage. So we can all agree that they are guilty of "creating/making" an image.
When the image is "electronically" passed onto another device (individual) the "receiving technology" creates/makes" the image onto the device storage.
Therefore the term "making an image" is used as a capture all term.

However the lawer went on to say how the Judge's guide lines does differentiate between the two scenarios and that is what happened in the case of Hew Edwards and the individual who gave them to him. 

In regard to other points you raised, many of us have suffered delays in the resolution of our "processing". Those are aspects that either favor or damage us but are out of our control; I have examples of both which have been dismissed when raised to the Appeal Judge. PS re time served point, it is little comfort but that has rarely ever happened in normal appeal cases.

Remember, once a conviction has been gained, whether by our guilt plea or trial, unless new evidence can be found it is out of our control.
Evidence it appears, is often discarded by solicitors and Police that we deem important: I provided evidence I was being blackmailed to both of those parties but both ignored it! I couldn't raise it with the Judge as I was told it would be seen as victim blaming.

All in all my friend and given my experience of those in your state of health, please find a resolution or peace of mind and focus whatever quality time you have left on improving your quality of life. You have aspects of your life; that you can affect and you know need to work on or enjoy more, so focus on them. Please.

Society suggests I must let go of all my expectations but I disagree, as whilst I have a voice, I have hope.

Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope is for tomorrow else what is left if you remove a mans hope.
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This forum supports these words, thank you Unlock and your contributors.

I have to challenge you on sentence length though; ignoring for the moment that the offence was commited by someone else, there was never any suggestions that they had distributed any images, and the police found no images on any of my devices (because there were none to find).

The judge jumped straight to the maximum sentence of three years (though hinted darkly that she could have gone up to ten if she liked - I don't recall her reasoning), then proceeded to knock off just six months for the time it took (four and a half years, three times thrown out of court, all due to prosecution failures (the "encouraging an offender" charge that fell through, an unavailable prosecutor, and what I really hoped was going to be the killing blow when I brought up the mismatched user ID issue (I had wanted to ask about this much, much earlier; my solicitor dissuaded me, saying if it did match it would "look really bad"; I insisted it wouldn't, but grudgingly agreed not to push the issue. Then when it came to court I realised the police had provided our cyber investigators with all the data, so we could check it without alerting them.

They checked, and it didn't match. The police's cyber expert had noticed this, and done a Google search (some expert! The original judge was less than impressed) on why it might not match. The reply was inconclusive, so the police had decided not to mention it. The judge aborted the trial in October 2019 and then COVID intervened...anyhoo...)

...and my poor health, and the fact my mother was taken into hospital the day I appeared in court, and died less than a month later. So a six months reduction for a five year delay, a degenerative disease and a dead parent.

It's obvious what she was doing. Thirty months is the threshold for putting people on the offender register for life. I was going to appeal (both conviction and length), but the prison made such a poor job of managing my healthcare they actually made me attempt suicide...not something I'd ever considered before. The initial rejection of the appeal came back just a day after I left the healthcare wing. It said if I pushed the issue, they could (read: would) ignore any time id served and reset the clock if I failed.

I was in no fit state for that level of stress.

I may have remembered it wrong...Cat D is a prison category of course. My head gets fuzzy sometimes from the Parkinson's. In 2010 there were your five categories as mentioned, and I think the lowest one (1) was for images that weren't illegal in themselves, but we're related to other picture series (ie a clothed child who in other pictures could be seen naked or being abused). It changed sometime (I'll take your word about 2014 as I don't know) to the current A, B and C.

The pictures were all nudes, but posed for the camera, like "Playboy" shots, not just day to day nudity like on a beach or something. By the old standard I guess they'd have been a "2", and by today's standard Category C.

I confessed even though I had deleted the images many months before. The police confirmed they'd had to recover the files. It may be that is the reason I received the caution.

The previous Sentencing Council guidelines were levels 1 (low) to 5 (high) and amended to the current system in 2014. I don't think there has ever been a Cat D.

The sentencing council cares about the difference, as do judges. You would get a much tougher sentence for production, whereas making is sentenced the same as possession.

Also in your previous post, you mentioned getting a caution for possession of 50 Cat D images. I've never heard of cat D, plus a caution is actually very rare for possession of any images, no matter what the category. Were the images actually illegal?

There's a lot of discussion of the difference. I think we have to accept outside of this forum, no one really cares. I mean in the UK, even drawn images are illegal. Not sure if stories are, but the general public would not complain if they were...they just want to label it as all the same thing. It works wonders for police too, who will leave illegal materials up on the website rather than close it immediately, because they can describel anyone they find looking at it as a "maker" of indecent images. Meanwhile REAL creators (ie abusers) are rarely charged, and there is no incentive for police to do so, when that would remove the material they will use to arrest hundreds of other viewers...which they will call "makers".

When police say they have "protected X children as part of this investigation", I often wonder how many of those children were "protected" in the last investigation, and go on to be "protected" in the next.. and in fact have been "protected" by police time after time since they were abused decades ago.