I stupidly haven't backed up for a few months, and have some very important photos that I just don't want to lose.
Well sinc eyou are not backing up you are 100% guarenteed to lose them - so as you said not backing up is a stupid choice
I have very little memory left on my computer, which is due to having so many photos.
Do you mean disk space (different from Memory)? What size is yoru hard drive nd how much free space do you have (Hint - you MUST always have a min of 10 GB)
Could this be the reason?
Yes - shortage of disk spcae cna cause many prblems includign this one and ill reult in lsot photos
If I rebuild iPhoto will I be left with a blank iPhoto folder?
no - unlss it is toally corupted and there is not way to rebuild it
Is there a way of being able to open the photo files without opening iPhoto?
No without making this worse
Als we need to know the vesion of iPhoto and of the OS
and (a guess for now) you probably need to pruchase an external hard drive frmatte Mac OS extended (journaled) and move your library to t
Moving the iPhoto library is safe and simple - quit iPhoto and drag the iPhoto library intact as a single entity to the external drive - depress the option key and launch iPhoto using the "select library" option to point to the new location on the external drive - fully test it and then trash the old library on the internal drive (test one more time prior to emptying the trash)
And be sure that the External drive is formatted Mac OS extended (journaled) (iPhoto does not work with drives with other formats) and that it is always available prior to launching iPhoto
And backup soon and often - having your iPhoto library on an external drive is not a backup and if you are using Time Machine you need to check and be sure that TM is backing up your external drive
LN
