University presidents (first Benjamin Rush Rhees, then Alan Valentine) occupied Eastman's mansion as a residence for ten years.

The Eastman Museum has received donations of entire archives, corporate and individual collections, and the estates of leading photographers, as well as thousands of motion pictures and massive holdings of cinematic ephemera.

In 1985, the Smithsonian Institution was offered title and control, if it agreed to leave the Eastman Archives in Rochester and pay $1 million a year towards maintenance.

One of only four film conservation centers in the United States (as of March 2006), the facility houses the museum's rare 35 mm prints made on cellulose nitrate.

George Eastman Museum has organized numerous groundbreaking exhibitions, including New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape in 1975.

The museum's holdings comprise more than 400,000 photographs and negatives dating from the invention of photography to the present day; 28,000 motion picture films; three million other cinematic objects, including letters, scripts, musical scores, lobby cards, posters, film stills, and celebrity portraits; more than 16,000 objects of photographic and cinematographic technology; an internationally renowned research collection of books, periodicals, and other materials on photography and moving images; and George Eastman's home furnishings and decorative arts, personal and business correspondence, private library, photographs, negatives, films, and related personal items.

The George Eastman Museum Motion Picture Collection is one of the major moving image archives in the United States.

It was established in 1949 by the first curator of film, James Card (1915–2000) who helped to build the George Eastman Museum as a leading force in the field with holdings of over 25,000 titles and a collection of stills, posters and papers with over 3 million artifacts.

[24] Items within the house itself include fragments of Eastman's coffin,[26] a mounted elephant head,[27] and an Aeolian pipe organ.

He created a unique urban estate complete with 10.5 acres (42,000 m2) of working farm land, formal gardens, greenhouses, stables, barns, pastures, and a 35,000-square-foot (3,300 m2), 50-room Colonial Revival mansion with a fireproof structure made of reinforced concrete.