Is it possible to play physical copies of PS1 games?

I have a decent collection of PS1 games and I’m looking to play some of them again, so I took a look at Retroarch. Popped in the first disk of Final Fantasy VII, but I can’t seem to find an option to run it, since it’s not an .iso file.

Is there an option I’m just seeing? Or some workaround? Or will I need an image of the disks?

No, we don’t have any physical disc drive handling. Your best bet would be to rip it to bin/cue using imgburn and then play the resulting image.