If I reinstall snow leopard using official disk will I lose my files on iMac(photos in iPhoto)?

My iMac with snow leopard has recently started working very slowly- I don't know what to do! After turning it on it works normally for about a minute and then it starts. Even if I don't enter the system and stay at the screen with list of users it happens- so please give a piece of advice how to fix it or otherwise I will have to reinstall OS, but I can't lose my photos!!

You may have diagnosed the problem, by the way
Snow Leopard will reinstall and automatically preserve User data, such as your photos. But maybe before you do that, if you don't already have a backup, first buy an external hard drive and if it does start successfully or reinstall successfully, move your valuable photos to the external drive, in case the internal Hard drive fails.
Once you have your valuable data copies to another location, you won;t have lost anything that cannot be replaced.

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