I saved all my iPhotos to a dvd back in 2003, but i can no longer see them

Back in 2003 if you saved your photos as an iPhoto Library by copying that one folder to the DVD, then with the DVD inserted launch iPhoto at the same time holding down the Option key, and it will ask you to choose a Library.

Choose the Library on the DVD.

That's good to hear you can see your photos again. About viewing them, I have iPhoto 8 (ver 7.1.4) on Snow Leopard (10.6.8) and from the iPhoto sidebar: Library there is a choice of Events and Photos. Clicking on Photos, will show all the albums and then at the bottom of the window is a triangle (Slideshow), which clicked on will give Slideshow dialoge box, then click Play and it will display all photos in all the albums.

I don't know if that satisfies your request but that is the only way I know of seeing them all in iPhoto.

iPhoto is more an organizational application for photos. There are better applications for just viewing photos but that requires them to be exported out onto the Hard drive to another folder, without organization.

Phoenix Slides is a good photo viewer for such viewing, which is my favourite.

http://blyt.net/phxslides/

Generally I keep iPhoto Libarires as you have done off disk, as a method of Archive. It is a pretty neat way of keeping stuff together. And then I have various picture folders on my hard drive, that I browse with Phoenix Slides.