Should I upgrade 10.5.8 or purchase new mac?

Hi,
I currently have an imac OS X 10.5.8 bought in 2008.  It has considerably slowed down at start up. I was looking to purchase an external hard drive primarily to back up photos but also with a view to improving performance.
My question is whether it's better to upgrade my machine (& if so why/what to), or buy a new mac (& if so which is best ) or just stay as I am & try to find a compatible external drive.
Another question on the back of that is I have considered storing photos on cloud but as far as I can gather, it wouldn't protect them fully as it's just a sync rather than physical storage you can retrieve in event of a hard drive failure.
I'm not techie so apologies if this doesn't all make sense.
Many thanks

Your iMac is getting too old to be compatilble with all the newer software, and will probably not run Mavericks, depending on your specs.
However, if you can install Mavericks (some 2008 iMacs are within Apple's requirements), you could squeeze another year or two out of your Mac. If so, some options are (if  you are handy with opening up your iMac, which should be possible): upgrading the hard drive (perhaps an SSD drive, which would really speed things up), upgrading the RAM (max it out if  you haven't already), change the internal DVD drive if it is going bad. Then definitely get an external storage drive for backup if nothing else, even if you get a new Mac.
Other than that there is nothing you can upgrade on an iMac, since everything else is soldered to the motherboard.
Good luck.

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